Colleges should have more price stratification than they do. At present the price difference between MIT and Umass Amherst out of state is only 41%. Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k, the difference likely doesn't materially matter to the student as they are looking at is as a ticket to a better life.
The top colleges have very complicated pricing schemes and are basically free to middle and lower income students, for example a student to MIT only pays if their family earns more than $90k a year which is above the median household income of $68k.
When I was there, less than 8% of the students were paying full tuition (of which a good chunk were international students).
At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
iirc, it was even lower when I went. And this is probably the most common mistake I see made about MIT, etc.; the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top schools runs deep, which simply isn’t as true for smaller or less popular schools.
Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to jump through, or anything else, but that’s a different argument.
> the lack of acknowledgment that the financial aid within top schools runs deep,
I think you're confusing depth and breadth. It's like the Harbor Freight coupon. Everyone gets 20% off with a few exclusions. But the people paying less than 80% (to continue the Harbor Freight metaphor) are few and far between.
No, I understand precisely what you're trying to say. Based on my (admittedly anecdotal) experience applying to colleges and working (however briefly) in Financial Aid at MIT, it was not a 20% blanket by any stretch; each case was treated individually and there was an explicit focus on ensuring students were not saddled with insane amounts of debt.
There were exceptions, particularly for wealthy folks and people who were 'on the line' income-wise, but the majority got significant financial aid.
Just to give you an idea, from MIT's stats[1]:
* Average need-based MIT scholarship: $47,593
* Students awarded a need-based MIT scholarship: 59%
* Students attending tuition-free: 31%
* Class of 2019 graduates with no student loan debt: 76%
* Average student loan debt for those who borrowed: $23,226
The trope that the expensive schools are the cause of the massive student loan debt problem is just that; a trope. When only 24% of the class graduates with any debt at all, I'm not convinced MIT (and similar) are the problem. This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
You kind of buried the lede in your last paragraph:
This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
It is reality that expensive schools cause the massive student loan debt problem, but expensiveness isn't totally buried in sticker price but total cost of attendance. Schools like HYSM don't saddle attendees with as much debt despite their high sticker price perhaps because of endowments.
You need to look at this from the perspective of someone who has little to no familial safety net and cannot rely on family resources to help them out when things get tough.
Boston area schools being "basically free on paper" to middle income families is a reflection of the fact that a student from a ~100k income family has better options for getting ahead in the world than attending these institutions at any cost but these institutions would lose legitimacy without "economic diversity" tokens so they have to reduce the price. Going to Harvard (or similar) if you're not from the kind of people who go to Harvard is a high risk, high reward gamble with years of your life. These schools have to reduce the potential downside in order to get the quality of candidates they want to get from the demographics they want to get them from (i.e. they want to be able to pick the very best people from the "can't afford to attend" demographic). Also it's good PR.
If you're the son of a plumber and your options are going to MIT for CS, or UMaine's "we match your local in-state tuition" deal paired with their crappy CS program the Maine one actually looks attractive because you're going to be surrounded by people a heck of a lot more like you (on a life experiences level), you're not gonna be bottom of your class and you won't be running the Boston rat race when it comes to housing, a part time job, commuting, and all the other "life" stuff". If you're the kind of high-achieving individual who goes to Harvard from a middle class background you're all but guaranteed to live more comfortably than your parents and retire comfortably regardless of the choice you make. Rolling a degree from a lesser state school into a stable job at BigCo isn't something you're worried about. The networking value add from Harvard or MIT isn't as much of a value add because you have no frame of reference for it and won't be making the kinds of life choices where it can be most helpful anyway (remember, no safety net, you're gonna be the one that builds it). So if you're gonna "win" no matter what you choose why add the additional risk of Harvard, MIT or some other program you could wash out of?
I always think about how absurd these pricing models are. Ah yes, if you're living lavishly at $90k per annum you, too, earn the privilege of paying for your education.
I suppose at some point someone has to pay. But you're not rich at $90k. And I just don't see many of those households earning between $90-250k a year wanting to pay for such a privilege.
From my perspective, you've got to be either very rich, or very poor going into those schools, because there's no reasonable room for those in-between unless you're taking out significant life-changing debt to do so.
And after it's all said and done, you're overwhelmingly statistically unlikely to be making so much that the debt didn't even matter.
> Both will leave a student heavily in debt to the tune of 150-300k
unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.
Plenty of middle class families making low to mid 100k but not contributing to their children's tuition bill because they live in HCOL area. But yes, low income students don't pay.
"For 25- to 34-year-olds who worked full time, year round in 2018, higher educational attainment was associated with higher median earnings. This pattern was consistent from 2000 through 2018. For example, in 2018 the median earnings of those with a master’s or higher degree ($65,000) were 19 percent higher than the earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree ($54,700), and the median earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree were 57 percent higher than the earnings of high school completers ($34,900)."[1]
None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy' category.
Close, but still not the data we need. What schools are looking at it family income of the students which means the 25-34 range isn't going to cut it. No need to do further research as I agree with your premise, but I think the number of students who receive minimal aid and family help might be higher than you expect.
> There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids education
There's no (as yet generally accepted) obligation for anyone else to pay for young adults higher education. Society has generally chosen to subsidize some costs for young people who seek such subsidy using formulas which assume that parents of means will also do so, but this does not reflect an obligation of parents to do so.
$100k is not enough to totally phase out financial aid from top schools, but sure, there are some families that could afford to pay but refuse to. still, no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner. if you have rich parents who won't pay and the school considers you a dependent, you're pretty much SOL.
> no one is writing $40k+ loans each year for students with no cosigner.
This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no risk loan from the loan providers perspective.
Schools almost never totally phase out financial help, but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500 work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial aid stats healthy while still getting paid.
This type of affect will only show up when viewing the percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great way to draw down the average.
I don’t think anybody thinks going is expensive, the expensive part is getting in, something fundamentally out of reach by design for 99.9% of the population and 95% of the applicant pool.
Something is really rotten with this country if the only tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a “better life” (though people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter factual outcome if you don’t get into an elite institution).
I left Umass Amherst with ~75k in debt in 2010. At the time the list price was 30k.
If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them with a $12/hr job at graduation.
How does that happen? I come from a time where my private university tuition (before grants, financial aid, etc) was around $25k/yr, and I understand things are different today.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of what recent college grads with English degrees make? I mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury themselves in that much debt without a very clear path out of it.
I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English degree is required, you can get that at a much more affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew they would have a really hard time paying that off...
There's a big sunk cost falacy at play. English is one of the most common majors at Umass, and the university isn't exactly forthcoming about the job prospects for this major. This person was the first to go to college in their family - but their parents had become modestly successfuly in the trades meaning they made ~100k combined in the Boston area. 100k is enough to push you out of substantial financial aid, but is not enough for your parents to afford a significant portion of your college costs in a high CoL area. A 3 bedroom and 2 kids gets expensive.
If you realize 2 years in that you're down ~60k, and a 5 year program will cost an extra 40k then you aren't going to change majors.
Umass Amherst is only ~25% more expensive than Umass Dartmouth on paper ( or at least was when I was attending ).
For myself, I got a physics degree and flipped into software engineering - I went bust in my first 2 years out of school but I was able to put things together and paid off my debt comfortably. The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math became impossible to justify.
Not the OP, but as I’d say that subjectively speaking, you’re better off going to MIT, but only if you have the passion and drive to succeed at a place like that (which you probably do if you got into MIT).
But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects.
What people have been saying in this thread is not incorrect (though should be nuanced): the ivy leagues are worth it for the caliber of the student body and reputation; otherwise, go to a (Tier 1) public school.
Unless, of course, you don’t want to and can easily afford otherwise.
You're fine. There are a ton of reasons MIT and UMass Amherst would help, but they are not for everybody, and I saw plenty of folks struggle at MIT and gain nothing out of it (even not graduating).
What matters a lot more than the name of the institution on your degree is experience; getting that experience may be a bit tougher at a small school (you don't have FAANGs or huge biotech firms recruiting there), but it is certainly not impossible.
Three of the last four engineers I hired had no formal CS degree (but they had gone to bootcamps).
BC, BU, and Northeastern are all excellent schools. Boston is a weird place.. any of those three schools would be a top tier private school in just about any other city in the country, but in Boston they're seen as second tier just because of the ludicrously good schools in Massachusetts. They're all in the top 50 according to US News.
Umass opens doors, MIT opens more - in 2010 when I graduated, my friends who went to MIT and did ok landed at 90k/yr in comp-sci fields, my friends from Umass who did ok made 40-70k in comp-sci fields.
Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt burden was much lower.
A huge fraction of the college educated people in MA have been to Umass. It's not an exclusive club.
Umnass opens doors in MA the way smoking pot makes it easier to make friends in college. You instantly have some token thing in common with a sizeable minority of the people around you and that gets you a head start on developing relationships.
I specifically mentioned doing 'ok' as a frame of reference. Those who do 'well' in a comp sci program tend to cluster in the top companies straight from college and the top companies only negotiate ~20k on a 150-250k entry level offer.
I did ok in college and very well in the private sector. I started as a sysadmin for a small finance company and am now a senior software engineer at Amazon Alexa working on ML for search. Hard work always pays off as long as your in the right field ( comp-sci is a great field ).
Let's put it this way. I couldn't find a job out of college, despite having a CS degree. I ended up settling for a very shit job that pays 21 hourly, 40 hours a week. Because the dev team is very small, I ended up with my hands in literally every piece of the programming pie. I put all that info on my resume and took even more lessons from this crap job to interviews in the past couple of weeks, and I just signed an offer from a lucrative tech company for about $140k annually, over a 200% raise.
Once you've done something in the industry, almost no one is going to give a hoot about what school you went to, they're going to care about what you've done in the industry, but at the start at least, you may have to settle for something a little shittier.
UMass Amherst is a great school, and state schools kind of see out-of-staters as cash cows. What's worse is third-tier private schools charging MORE than MIT.
This is fine for trade schools which can reasonably measure success by short term income of new graduates, but this is a terrible metric for higher learning in general.
A valuation based on immediate financial value turns universities into trade schools (which to be fair, more people need / are really looking for).
And also it would turn universities in to not-very-good trade schools. Why would they train school teachers or social workers when they make so little money?
Metrics change what they observe, unless you are extremely careful, usually for the worse.
I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it'll be both.
The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.
Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.
I wouldn't say it's just for credentials. Having passionate and smart colleagues and professors does wonder for your own passion and determination. It's the same reason companies have much more innovation in offices compared to remote working.
The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
I went to a crappy state school after community college and met exactly 0 passionate professors along the way. It was an astoundingly miserable experience. None of my classmates have gone on to do anything of note.
which is exactly why a good school is better than a bad one: the courses and materials might be the same, but the experience can be totally different. IMO for most of us it's not worth getting into debt to pay any college, unless the college is in top X, or if you need the certification for your profession. Paying 60k a year for a mediocre college is one of the worst decisions you can make. You can achieve just the same amount of knowledge in less time on your own.
I think there's a value in being immersed in a subject, with peers equally passionate about it.
You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
If that’s the case you can get it for nearly for free by just buying the books and reading them rather than paying $25,000 a year for that same privilege.
no, we have formal education because not everyone is an autodidact and may need actual help in evaluating and learning skills.
Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not learning physical therapy from coursera, or even something like human resources; some things you need others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide facilities for.
No, he is right. Employers demand cookie cutter education and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that if everyone gets their cookie cutter education, earns money and then pays for their kids liberal arts education. We are at a point where everyone gets access to college but not everyone can actually support themselves. This is why the first generation of students has to maximize economic gains above everything else. Once the economy is doing well your kids will be able to pursue their dreams, or you can just go back to college yourself.
I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education. They’re doing it because every adult or counselor in their life told them they have to go to some college no matter what.
And, worse, many office jobs that were satisfied with high school diplomas or 2-year degrees in 1980 were requiring a bachelors by 2000. Even when the degree was irrelevant. Seriously, data entry does not require a history degree. At one place I worked nearly every one in the data entry positions had a history degree, and all had 4-year degrees of some kind.
Requiring a 4 year degree for a job even if the major isn’t relevant doesn’t seem wrong to me. Maybe data entry is taking it too far? Maybe the data was really sensitive and complicated.
It causes inflation of job requirements, delays entry into careers, produces vast amounts of unnecessary debt and spending, promotes substandard graduate programs so people can be differentiated from the other history majors, and all because a high school diploma is considered worthless by most companies for their non-technical entry level positions.
If that’s a useful differentiator then people would probably use it. Maybe you’re trying to imply that whether or not a candidate has a certain credential is not useful as a differentiator?
To expand on your point, it's the arbitrary and superfluous nature of this requirement.
If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't, physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't use this as a discriminator on all my employees, only the ones that it made sense for.
Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar jobs.
If the knowledge is not required for the job, what is the degree for? Is it a concealed/outsourced IQ test? Is it a concealed illegal minimum age requirement? Isit collective insanity?
I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal and/or deranged.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'd embrace and extend your remarks with two other illegal or semi-illegal reasons:
One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day.
The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
Flipping this around, put yourself in this situation: you have five open positions, and expect 300 applicants. You have approximately 1 hour per day to interview, and need to fill the positions in 10-15 business days.
You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed.
You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?
Past work experience, letters of reference, relevant training program/certification. This is assuming there is not a degree program that can be seen as preparatory for the position. A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload. It tells you the person was willing to spend $40-80k (in much of the US) for a piece of paper that didn't prepare them for the job you're hiring them for.
Young people don't have past work experience, hence the need for them to put themselves through a college to serve as a signal for what they might be capable of.
Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
University is also a social exercise, which can serve to signal that you are okay or at least exposed to the type of cultural norms that might exist at an employer that is already full of similarly college educated people.
I listed relevant training/credentials. 2-year degree programs and 1- or 2-year training programs used to be more common than they are now, and should be restored as a reasonable entry into more white collar jobs.
> Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
That's actually not the case, unfortunately. My wife is fluent in two languages, can read and communicate in a couple more but isn't fluent, has 12+ years of experience, and letters of reference from CFOs and CEOs from major international corporations, and is struggling (here in the US) to get a non-minimum wage job in a medium sized city (we'd be better off if we were in a larger city, but this is where my work is right now).
For a somewhat large company, it may be necessary to come up with hiring standards to save time, one of which might be a minimum of a Bachelors degree, and maybe of a US college for simplicity of verifying the degree. I'm sure if you had the ear of an executive and they really wanted to hire you, they could make an exception, but that solution doesn't scale.
My point was more that the signal an elite college serves is relatively short lived assuming you then get experience at highly regarded employers. For example, once you have worked at a FAANG, no one cares if you went to a low ranked school.
> A 4-year degree is a useless indicator when it's irrelevant to the workload.
But it's not. It gives a good indication that the applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I listed.
And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant training program or certification. Few people grow up hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so they're not going to go to school for that.
Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it tells an employer far more than they were "willing to spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to go to school to learn about something they love, then they get out and need a job.
I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree holders as a desirable criteria.
Why are there 300 applicants? Why do employers have high standards for low skill jobs? It's because all these people failed to get an education that prepares them for a well paying job and now the employer is basically benefiting from their choice of education without having to fund it or pay a good wage.
As it is right now, being an average human in a developed country doesn't pay because there are lots of average humans in developing countries who are begging for work harder than you do.
High school standards in the US have reached a point where I would not trust someone with only a high school diploma to be able to do data entry. Bachelor's degrees aren't a perfect credential but they're a passable filter, in lieu of building a much more extensive hiring process for low-level jobs.
If highschool is really as terrible as you say and any random college is better then why not abolish most of it and let students take a reduced college workload at 16 years old? They would be able to finish college a year earlier. It's weird to have a dumbed down version of linear algebra and analysis in high school and then redo it in college.
Some public high schools offer programs like this, that let students accumulate some college credits while still in high school. This can shave a year off your 4 year degree.
The article is about colleges in the US, so I have no reason to doubt you. It’s just a ready bleak observation for someone who is raised to pursue a career that would make me happy, and be lucky enough to live in a country that allows me to do that.
More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.
I wouldn’t know. I went to college for a topic I’ve always loved and that happens to be lucrative.
I actually think the narrative of “pursue a career you love” is still the basic message. It’s just framed as requiring a college education in order to achieve that. There is some truth in it, as it’s hard to even get your foot in the door without the credential.
Outside perspective - here in Europe, enormous numbers of people in late middle age to old age return to university out of love of learning. Despite low to negligible impact on wages etc. They generally have better outcomes in terms of overall grades also. There's a boatload of research into intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation that supports the idea that we have an innate love of learning.
> I don’t think most people going to 3rd-tier college to study humanities are doing it out of some abstract love of education.
Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself.
Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't have a lot of experience with other humanities, but history is a verb rather than a noun. You learn history by doing history rather than reading it. I do think that universities are often too conservative about getting students into the archive quickly but a bunch of institutions are rapidly equipping students with archival and analysis skills and sending them to do history. This is very difficult to obtain from a raw library.
Yea, but we don't need the large-college-campus model for education for its own sake. As far as I can tell, the social focus of those institutions actually _hinders_ education (even as it supports social & emotional growth, networking, etc., which all serve the secondary purposes of campus-colleges).
In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
As a couple of other commenters have said, lots of ways to get high-quality education freely/cheaply without going to a university.
Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting.
And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
>Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine.
Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job.
Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
I don't think that's the reason medical school is exclusive. It's expensive and time-consuming to train good doctors. If you are sick, would you rather have your doctor be the one who who graduated from a class of 25, or the one who graduated from a class of 250? Which one do you think got the better education? More hands-on experience? Direct attention from instructors?
Every reply to you is repeating the same thing and they’re all wrong. Woe on the next great sociologist, philosopher, or artist who gets discouraged from study because “just do CS so you can make money” or “just go to the library it’s literally the same thing as four years of training under experts in the field and discussion with other smart young people.”
Almost everyone goes to college to get a job. People who can afford to take risks like trying to become a philosopher don’t come from backgrounds where price is even a consideration. No middle class person dumb enough to believe trying to be a sociologist is a good idea will be smart enough to actually make that happen.
Realistically, the next great sociologist and philosopher is going to be an academic, and the amount of spaces for academics in those fields is so vanishingly small that if you went to a third-tier university, you're almost entirely unlikely to get one. If you went to Stanford/Harvard/etc., maybe, but still not great odds.
It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
That probably has more to do with 'greatness' as a product of the publishing system. (Meaning: it's great because it's published in a prestigious medium, not because the content is inherently superior) The next plato will likely be completely uncelebrated in these mediums, and will publish on an uncelebrated website or publisher.
To be fair, first Plato was born in aristocratic family and got best education possible at the time with private tutors. He definitely did not go to equivalent of 3rd tier university.
I don't really know of any great sociologists though.
I kind of feel it may be a made up field to promote forms of Marxism and not something that actually contributes much to the body of human knowledge. Nothing entirely wrong with that either if it's something a person is into, it's just, well, we might actually be better off with less sociology students. The half baked and non realistic ideas that come out of that cause problems in the real world.
The reason I feel this is not from outside observation but because I spent a bunch of time in sociology classes many years ago. 4 as I recall. I wish I'd spent the time in extra math classes and I believe the world would be better off if people did.
The vast majority of people are not the next great sociologist, philosopher or artist. The idea that you create a super individual by ruining the lives of thousands of people is really destructive. Is that genius really productive enough to offset the productivity loss of thousands of people?
This is certainly true, but the harsh reality is that there are “job training” degrees and luxury degrees. If you have all your other financial ducks aligned, I don’t mind if you drive a Mercedes or decide to get a degree you can’t possibly hope to get a job with. Otherwise it’s just financially irresponsible.
You know the theme of the movie is actually arguing against that quote, right? The conversation on the bench is the climax of the film; Robin Williams lectures Matt Damon about the limitations of book learning.
I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this actually.
Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class).
Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
Another problem is wildly varied quality. I’ve seen course material from some community colleges that made me think “wow, this seems to be a high quality resource” in all sorts of interesting subjects, but most community colleges in places I’ve lived near or been too have limited programs and often low quality ones at that.
I think your comment misses my original intent. If people might value education for its own sake (which is what I was replying to), then I have found Community Colleges to be the perfect place for this.
But to address your point:
> The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
Since the instructor I had was a well known local musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig, and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I think you would be surprised just what type of networking oppritunities are actually are at a decent community college.
Like I said in my comment:
> I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year university. So he went to community college, and a colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was able to pay his way through college with that job) and is one of the best contrbutors to that group.
Yea I missed the point. Everyone I’ve ever met who went to a community college did it specifically to learn job skills since those are what all the programs were for. I didn’t know they taught things just for the sake of knowledge or personal interest.
There's a massive number of people who as adults or even seniors take classes on a non-degree path at a CC-- whether it's a language, an arts class, or whatever.
I suspect community colleges are a fantastic way to recruit people who one would not find otherwise. People taking classes at night and holding down a full time job, and doing well, just out of interest- that's someone who has potential.
If you insist on a pyramidical social structure, 99% of the population will never meet or network with the top people in their field anyway, and as such a school that prevents them from doing what's impossible anyway yet saves money is wise, especially if the alternative is spending ten times as much on a pale imitation of what the people at the top would get but they'll never associate with them anyway.
Classic microeconomics vs macroeconomics problem. Individuals can always improve but you can't extend "just pull yourself up by your bootstraps harder" to an entire civilization. An individual benefits personally by going to Yale, if they can. You can't fix a national education system by making the official strategy telling kids their only hope is getting into Yale. Especially if there's an alternative that actually works for the masses, like CC.
They generally aren't that high quality in terms of classes, and the humanities they offer are "transfer credits" when they aren't practical skills. I mean that there's little chance to go to a community college that has a strong English section, or gives any more than the basics of history or psychology.
CCs are mostly there either for cheap transfer credits, or technical programs for local industry; things like cad/cam, aviation tech, etc.
> They generally aren't that high quality in terms of classes, and the humanities they offer are "transfer credits" when they aren't practical skills.
There were a lot of classes I saw (and some I took) at Universities that were just as bad, if not worse.
I would say they have a wide variety, much like universities. I have generally had a pretty good experience doing it for non-credit (i.e. education for it's own sake).
I value education for its own sake. So I got my degree from a well regarded university in a lucrative field that I'm good at and enjoy. A roof over my head and money in my bank account, I can study anything I want without worrying about the financial yield. Sometimes that takes the form of free MOOCs. Sometimes that takes the form of paid classes taken through university extension programs. Unlike when I was taking classes for degrees, I'm learning things I want to learn, not things I have to. It's very nice.
This is the way to go, go to university so you can earn money. Once money is no longer a problem, focus on all your other life goals. That could involve getting the education that you really want and as long as you can afford it that's perfectly acceptable.
However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
With the costs required to obtain an education as they are, we are well beyond valuing education simply for the sake of valuing education. If it requires years and years to pay off, then we absolutely must look at it like an investment.
That's entertainment and if you have to get a loan to fund your entertainment then you better plan on finding a way to pay that loan back. There is a reason why this form of entertainment was reserved for the rich, they could afford it.
Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.
There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
“The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students.
Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”
Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.
It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
TBF you can learn how MOSFETs and compilers work on your own too, you don't need college courses for those either. A higher education degree is a package deal and isn't necessarily intended to be a vocational training course, for better or for worse.
But of course businesses do treat it as a vocational course if they gatekeeper based on that degree. The actual value on the job is different than in the interview room, a fact that perpetuates inequality. I’m a counterpoint in that I’ve no degree but have done well, but I can’t find myself recommending self learning because the barrier to initial entry to industry is so high.
Have you considered that one reason businesses gatekeep based on the degree is /because/ of the well-roundedness that comes from a university education instead of a trade school or online learning?
Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc.
If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
the business just did not have a good filtering (recruitment) function - either time or expertise, and so decided to use other signals, like college degrees, etc.
You can get a very simplified and overall summary of a compiler and mosfet but you won't necessarily be learning it. Knowing the basic of a mosfet is very different from actually getting hands on experience and taping out a 7nm chip.
>> I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
Ya, and the acting students can learn about "compliers" online too. Outside of a garage startup, an engineer is useless if they cannot integrate into a larger team through the spoken and written word. I've run into BS students who haven't read a book since highschool. I've met compsci masters students who still panic if asked to stand up and explain their work to a large group. If a few hours learning about theatre helps solidify your language and presentation abilities, maybe it should be mandatory.
Well, the one thing we can all agree on is that football has no place in education. I have never played it, don't watch it, and therefore it has never done anyone any good anywhere.
The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand.
> Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
> "Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand."
I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
Which is exactly what I'd predict in a world where "Interest Surges in Top Colleges, While Struggling Ones Scrape for Applicants".
When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier colleges don't actually have the product that's in demand. So they can charge basically nothing since they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a business (unless they lie to students who don't know better and pretend that they're selling prestige they don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit ones are explicitly this.
If they actually provided valuable education that'd be different, but they largely don't.
I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education.
Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or economically viable on their own.
Actual education is super powerful, it's just a diminutive part of what Universities have become and they're not very good at it.
> I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education.
Actually, the top schools would benefit from these the most. With close to 100% employment rates and better median salaries than anyone else.
> Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
I wonder how much income stream is coming from underperforming programs at modern Universities. For some of them it must be substantial. And I'm also wondering if some of them also redirect the income toward more useful programs or research.
The top schools don't need ISAs because they're selling prestige they can charge a lot more for. Since they're so highly selective they can admit only students who will succeed anyway.
Maybe over time that prestige will change, but I don't see that as near-term. I think it'd be better if they did ISAs, I just don't think they'll want to (or their ISAs will be worse for students than Lambda School's).
Right now top schools can charge up front and it doesn't really matter what they provide.
Elite colleges are weird. At state schools, usually the technical programs are the most rigorous. While elite colleges offer largely identical technical degrees, their most difficult or prestigious course might be something obscure like Philosophy, Politics & Economics.
It's almost like a shibboleth: only those who actually went to the school will recognize the prestige.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
In engineering/math, I've seen it swing both ways. Some professors couldn't be bothered to teach, because are so busy w/ their research and/or jaded w/ the University: implicit assumption is to baby the undergrads and shepherd them along the system. In regards to funding in relation to teaching ability, one way to look at it is that a PI is in essence a salesman, you have to sell your vision to get funding/appointments, sell your lab to get good phd candidates, and sell the subject to undergrad as something that is interesting and worthy of learning.
You are right on the mark on the PI being a sales-man/woman/*. People forget how basically the purpose of a leader is to sell the product, and sell it hard.
Think of a research group like any other business. You have to create a product and sell it, except the product is publications and publicity.
Related, university presidents are fundraisers first, ie selling their nonprofit to donors, in exchange for buildings, chairs, spots on committees (for poors), fuzzie-wuzzies, etc.
> the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
Also anecdata, but I've observed no such correlation. In the sciences I've seen the opposite - that Nobel prize winners (or similar) can be terrible at teaching undergraduates, and even poor mentors for grad students. Some faculty even seem to resent teaching introductory or undergraduate courses. In contrast, I've found many graduate students still remember what it was like to be a beginner trying to learn and understand the material for the first time. (Though not all of them are great lecturers.)
That being said, in CS I've found many Turing award type faculty to be fantastic lecturers (and occasionally acceptable graduate advisors.)
Overall, I'd put my money behind the incentives: at a large research university, tenure is based on 1) research grants, 2) research productivity, publication, and reputation. The university will pay lip service to teaching (both mentoring graduate students and teaching undergraduates) but it is usually a distant third if it is actually considered at all.
It's not a coincidence that the university and faculty will talk about a "teaching load" - i.e. a burden that one is supposed to endure that distracts from the primary goals of fundraising and research.
Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases?
I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the price increase. The current loan program was introduced to stem increasing government direct grant expenditures.
Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.
Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
>It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.
> why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"?
I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
>There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine."
The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden.
Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.
Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Why can't they test or interview folks into master's programs? Schools are precluding themselves from good candidates that didn't see the value in bachelor's degrees (often for the reasons found in this thread).
I suspect willingness to complete an undergraduate degree is a strong signal to masters' programs. The 4-year degree is itself part of the test for the master's program.
Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science requires neither GRE nor letters from professors. I got my letters from my former managers. Of course you can get them from professors, if you want...they want letters from anyone who can vouch for your competency and ability to complete the program.
> Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program?
Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
Looks like University of Bristol. In the UK, it's common for universities to offer undergraduate masters programs, which are basically the regular 3-year bachelors program with another year tacked on for the masters education as far as I can tell.
Every school that has tried to get me to consider their masters CS programs (despite not realizing I don’t have a bachelors) so far has rejected me on the basis that I don’t have a bachelors. Definitely curious where you went.
For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be the case in the Canadian public university that I attended, the University of Waterloo.
> why are all degrees four years?
UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)".
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree?
Wow. As a European I had no idea that Canadian education was so expensive. Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care. Obviously much cheaper than the US - which is life destroyingly expensive. But the figures you cite are still pricey enough to exclude enormous numbers of people from higher education.
On the other hand, the majority of US college kids would not be able to get into university in Germany nor Austria.
You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays for both.
In the German system only the best students are admitted period -- there is no university available for 2/3 of the population. And it only lasts 3 years. You would also be shocked to learn that the US government spends more per capita subsidizing tertiary education than the German government. Except that we also allow non-subsidized students the option of attending at their own cost, so at least they have more options than in the German system, where University education is simply unavailable to them.
Almost all German pupils that want to can study, the old haupt-, realschule and gymnasium system you refer to is a lot less meaningful these days than a few decades ago (e.g. lots of kids can go to a gesamtschule and still get into university even if they weren't admitted to a gymnasium).
Additionally most vocational schools (Fachhochschule) are also free/cheap in Germany and Austria so even those pupils who can't get into university can still get affordable education.
You can study something somewhere, say at a trade school, or night school, but not at a university and we are talking about university education. We are not talking about secondary education or vocational trade schools. Telling a kid who wants to go to university that they can't do that because their test scores are too low but there is a great refrigeration maintenance vocational school that will accept them does not mean that university education is available to them.
In the US if you have a checkbook and pulse there will be a university that will accept you regardless of your test scores. Not every university, not MIT, but Joe Bob State will take you. Universities even offer remedial education programs so those who are barely literate and innumerate can still enroll, stay longer, and graduate from the university. In Germany you would have been routed out of the system and rerouted to a vocational school, which you are lumping in with a university education by using the vague word "study". "Anyone can study". Well, anyone can study at a library in the US, too, but we are talking about admission to university.
You might want to check what a "Fachhochschule" (University of Applied Sciences) actually is. It is not a vocational school in the way the US understands it. You can get accredited Master's degrees there, but usually no PHDs. The line is blurred though, some actually carry out research nowadays, but often in cooperation with another University.
Yeah not sure why this is downvoted. The US has WAYYYY more colleges and Universities, and in many cases there is no filter on admissions for them. If you can pony up 3 letters of recommendation and a cheque, you're in.
Many of these kids shouldn't go to Uni, and end up taking 5+ years to graduate.
In Germany most of these kids would go to a trade school or apprenticeship.
I suspect the engineering tuition is set as a function of supply and demand - the University of Waterloo has a fairly competitive engineering program. For example, engineering at Laurentian University, another public university in the same province, is only $10,000/year.
Still, that's a large burden. There are government programs that provide a mix of non-repayable grants and deferred payment loans to people who qualify based on family income. I don't have too much personal experience with them, but I think the intent (and, for the most part, effect) is that economic ability shouldn't be a barrier for attendance.
US education is hardly "life-destroyingly expensive". It's more than the rest of the world, but it is definitely manageable to pay for it yourself with student loans. If you have financial aid (billions of dollars in aid is out there for good students in financial need). More cost-conscious folks can save thousands more by splitting an undergraduate degree between a low-cost 2-year college (community college, junior college) and then transfer in to a 4-year school to complete a degree.
Bear in mind those are Canadian dollars, not the regular dollars, so the price tag is always going to be a little more confusing for the non-Canadians.
It is largely free if your means are limited. I’m in 4th year of mathematics at Waterloo right now and all but $170 of my $4300 tuition this term was paid for by government grants and bursaries.
Waterloo is actually even more expensive for international students. Some that I know are paying ~$3000 per half credit (5.0 credits per year is the norm) and that’s just in mathematics, not software engineering.
Can't say for Canada but in the US the colleges look to the parents unless the student is over a certain age (most commonly 26).
There's the FAFSA[1] required by almost every college. Many private colleges also require the CSS Profile[2] which is far more detailed and intrusive. Many people agree that the colleges do this for maximizing their profit and/or providing an incentive to go where it's "less than sticker".
Some 18 year olds are not on good terms with their parents and can't get their parents to complete the processes. Not sure what happens then but you'd suspect nothing good.
When I went to college you could bypass this by getting married, and I considered it with a high school classmate. We weren’t dating and weren’t even really friends - she just happened to bring it up in class once and I told her I’d had the same thought.
I ended up going for pretty close to free after scholarships anyways, though she did joke about consummating the marriage so I guess I missed out on that.
> They include your parents’ income in your means test
I wonder what happens if your parents are wealthy and you're on good terms with them and not estranged... they just don't happen to want to fund your education.
The government will basically offer financial aid to everyone and the interest rate on those are really low.
My friend got a law degree for ~40k CAD and he got it all from financial aid.
Now that he is working, he is paying it off with a comical interest rate.
Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2 of those personally).
In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was the experience at my public college, as well as that of almost everyone else I talked to.
The University of Oregon charges based on credit hours so more or less its an identical price for any degree (sans scholarship). I've always been under the impression this this is the norm. I'm glad your school offered reduced rates for some degree paths but I think it is an outlier.
Unfortunately, they didn't reduce the rates. It was the same tuition price per semester, regardless of credit hours (as long as you still stay full-time, because the price for part-time is half). Which meant that people who graduated in quicker time spent less money. The cost was also the same for all undergrad degrees.
But it wasn't much of a concern at GT, because of the statewide Hope/Zell Miller scholarship covering the tuition based on the credit hours (and not on the actual semesters, you just have to have GPA high enough to qualify, which wasn't that high at all). So if you wanted to speedrun it and risk your GPA, you could do that. But if you wanted to take it slower, that scholarship allowed you to do so, because they paid regardless of how many years you took to graduate, as long as you were full time (with some nuances around part-time that aren't worth getting into right now), had high enough GPA, and you werent over the total cap of credit hours needed to graduate from your program.
My bad, I didn't mean "low" as in "bad". I meant "low" in terms of what people would consider "impressive". 3.0 won't get you into any respectable med school, and 3.0 is also pretty much a very bare minimum required to get into a decent grad school program.
While keeping 3.0 at GT might be a fairly difficult task, it is more than doable, and it wouldn't be considered by most GT students as some ungodly achievement. For comparison, the average GPA for fraternity members at Georgia Tech for Spring 2020 was 3.7 (which is higher than the average GT student GPA, but not by some crazy amount, and I think is a pretty good proxy for showing that 3.0 is not something that only a small number of students can achieve).[0]
>Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps
One semester is designed with a particular set of prerequisites in mind. Most times, one prerequisite holds back every other class on the career path. So, if you don't take that one class that semester, you can only take the elective courses until you take that class. Which means that when you run out of electives, what was supposed to be one semester becomes two, with the only course you qualify for in the second being the one you missed (this isn't necessarily true for the spring semester, since you could take the missing class during the summer.)
This is fine, but it leads to a disparity; taking on more classes than the recommended workload has a pretty linear correlation with decreased time to a degree (though the problem still persists that you don't qualify for your next classes); but taking on less than the recommended often jumps straight to doubling the time needed for a degree, with very little room in-between.
It all heavily depends on how your specific college manages your curriculum and how open the choices are.
My personal example: decided to ignore most of the general studies classes I could ignore (aka those that weren't prereqs for any major-related classes, like most social studies) for the first year, did two 14-16 hour semesters for the first year, about 12 hours (each semester) for the second and third year (aka minimum required to be considered full time), took one fall semester off and then did one summer semester instead, and then finished off my last year with two back-to-back 22-24 hour semesters (during which I took a lot of those classes I ignored during my first year).
My school let us do it pretty much free-form, and it was amazing. Taking all the important major-related classes early on let me become knowledgeable enough for internships before a lot of peers (since I ended up taking some important major classes a semester or two ahead instead of taking gen ed classes like a lot of others did at the time), and during my last year I got a bit of a break by taking some of those "general ed" classes that most of my peers took early on.
I love this system, because it allows people to balance it all as they see fit. Some people would like to get all the gen ed classes out of the way first. Some would want to save them for last. Some would like to take them regularly at a "one general ed class per semester" pace. Some people would like to just do 16 credit hours every semester. Some would like to slow down at times and them ramp up heavily at times (which is what I did). Some would like to graduate early, others would like to take their time. Whichever style works for you.
And yeah, we had a general guideline for every major, with every class planned out every semester serving as a "sample workload", but it was just a guideline. Most people followed it to a degree, but not close. Others completely threw it out of the window, because they sorta knew what and how they wanted to do it. I think it is helpful to have for those who don't want to plan out things to their max efficiency and just want to not worry about it. But it isn't something that everyone is forced to abide by, it is more like an advice.
Some engineering programs are a five-year bachelors, due to a requirement to have a 1-year internship. Yet, other universities offer a 5-year BS+MS engineering program.
I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality.
This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements.
It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings.
What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.
I think LS is piloting a program that pays students per month while they attend.
Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of.
Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that.
I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return.
LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different.
- They cap return to 30k.
- They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year.
- They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).
> This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.
>Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.
Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.
I think it's not good - not because a CS degree needs to be more expensive, but because the liberal arts degrees are over priced.
A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does.
CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less.
The current system harms the poor.
As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
>This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.
What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action.
If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
>What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.
As other comments have pointed out, many colleges do not require you to stay for four years if you can finish faster. But most students do not want to, or are not capable of, taking twice the normal course load. Not everything is a conspiracy by the elites to extract more money from the masses.
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree
Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree.
It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent.
Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids.
Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.
Are there no kids interested in reading classics on their own? Shouldn't the barrier be even lower since those classics aren't protected by copyright? All you'd need is a kindle with internet.
What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?
You are correct about lending being the problem. Education is not a free market where capital is allocated in proportion to value that is created, because all of the loans are subsidized. And the government can’t put itself into a position where it subsidized some loans but not others based on the curriculum, because there would be public outrage.
A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.
I've listened to lecture courses from The Great Courses (Teaching Company) on literature, history, music, philosophy, and science for 20+ years now. I get to learn what I want, at my own pace, etc. The lecturers are good, and I can replay or repeat lectures as I like. Many advantages of taking college courses without the hassles you ran into.
The student loan system created artificial demand. Demand increases price. Students get larger loans because it's easy. Demand continues. Prices rise more, and so on. Price will rise as much as the market can bear.
Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose.
That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
> That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige
Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
Agreed - "students refuse to do so" as the parent comment mentioned because they recognize the risk, both with the things you suggest and the ding to the prestige they're trying to buy in the first place.
While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero
If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics.
A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.
Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame.
Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
Classics programs generally require more evaluated prose writing, as well as text reading and analysis, so it is reasonable to assume that they would yield benefits in actual writing skill.
However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
I don't mean to come across as overly harsh or partisan against liberal arts majors. I think the content is often interesting. I just think it should be taken along side a technical major too.
I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
I assume you haven't read many academic papers in CS? ;-)
That's a bit of a joke. Clarity is of course a primary virtue in all forms of academic writing, and one that is often ignored either unintentionally or in an attempt to impress one's reviewers and/or to signal one's membership in a particular tribe.
> Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
HackerNews tradition requires that I point out the considerable difference between software developer skills and knowledge of computer science.
Coding experience doesn't give you what a degree in computer science gives you, neither is a degree in computer science a substitute for experience as a developer.
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
While those skills are useful for life, they are "worth" nothing in the marketplace without the ability to sell yourself.
Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects)
Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
> It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete
This 100% - you said it better than I did.
It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity.
Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.
I think you are romanticizing the idea of a liberal arts degree. To put it shortly, engineers, certified mechanics, HVAC folks and other never have to go to such means to justify the existence of their educational programs. Only when we are talking about true liberal arts, do we see people wax poetic about everything other than the usefulness of the subject material.
Probably one of the more relevant things I did in school was working on the newspapers. I was an engineering major and am still in technology but basically in a totally different field and I'm as much a writer as anything else at this point.
> but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well
If writing well is to do it simply, concisely, and interestingly, then I don't think anyone tried to teach me any useful skills related to writing after eighth grade. I learned more reading "On Writing Well" in a bookstore waiting for my dad to buy a book in my 30s than I learned between 9th grade and the end of my B.S.
I don't remember anyone teaching any classes on how to learn. Would be incredibly surprised if the classics had changed that much since I went to school. There are skills that are useful to learning how to learn like how to use Anki, interweaving, visualization, chunking, etc.. but all of that information comes out of psychology research so I'd be surprised if it was taught in any of the classics.
> There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero?
Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.
The 100s of choices in university are all accredited by the same few accreditation bodies. This is a partial cause of the cookie cutter nature of the degree programs.
I'll disagree with this. A very rough fact of life is not everyone will be able to go to a top school. For example the language requirement most top schools have excludes many people who didn't grow up with a second language, and lack the extra money to afford language tutoring.( Or a stable home life in highschool as most college language classes work much better if you took it in high school).
I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not something I can do, at least in an academic environment.
That's said my life is much better for having attended college. However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four years is too much. So if you do two years at community college, that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is just tuition.
That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these for-profit institutions.
I don't actually think you're particularly far off from my point.
In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.
To be blunt, many of us graduate high school unable to properly read and write . At least 2 years of college is always needed to shore these basic skills up.
Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for
I'm not trying to be a dick, but introductory foreign language courses were, in my opinion, broadly perceived to be a complete joke, and passable without the slightest capability of forming a complete sentence.
Is it possible your community college was just unreasonably difficult?
Yes, infact I took French again at a different community college and passed.
The first community college I went too tried to cram 6 semester units into a single class. This still had the effect of derailing my life as I had to pick a different school to transfer to.
> Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under
I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in supply.
I think a better alternative is having more schools have tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset in the real world.
Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing can pay reasonably well.
But many of the PhDs minted at first-tier colleges have no career prospects but to teach at second-tier ones, and so forth. You need lots of students down the chain to keep them employed; it's basically a Ponzi scheme.
So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.
Isn't a PhD a research degree? Isn't the goal of that degree to generate useful research? Yes, there are some (meager) employment benefits afterwards but the PhD itself is your academic career.
Seems to me like further polarization. Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated, while the rest will skip any personal development and just go right into the market.
Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
> Only those that can afford the elite colleges (or be “smart” enough to get in) will be educated
This is how it is today. The only difference is people are paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not actually learning valuable skills.
> Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like – unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of useless degrees, and increased tuition.
Yet somehow the rest of the developed world manages to offer liberal arts degrees that don’t cost $50,000 a year. The trick is: don’t spend millions on football stadiums, don’t hire hundreds of administrators, and don’t offer student loans that are impossible to default on.
It really isn’t that complicated, especially for the single wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
I work for a consulting company which helps these struggling colleges. It's a difficult discussion to have. When you tell them that they are spending way, way more than they need to on administration, they usually 'ahem' and 'guffaw', especially when the implication is that the people in the room with you are part of the problem.
"We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans"
What? Giving out easy loans doesn't make something cheaper, it makes something more expensive up to causing a bubble that will crash the rest of economy, like we did with housing in 2008.
> Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
I don't know what country you are talking about but at least in the US, we have community colleges which are very cheap and can "educate people in the skills necessary for being good citizens". It is only the worthless degrees from private / for-profit colleges which are a problem.
I have taken classes at communities colleges. I’m sure many are good institutions, but my experience was that absolutely no one there cared about learning. It is very clearly treated as “second class.”
More education isn't needed. Specialized education tailoring to an individual's needs is what is lacking and somehow everyone decided college is that education, because companies refuse to fund training programs.
You have the wrong idea because of the headline prices of elite schools. Yes, the prices are high.
On the other hand, no-one who is admitted to (say) Harvard is going to be prevented from going by an inability to pay. These top schools are rich enough to fund need-based scholarships.
(source: wife is a professor at an Ivy League school)
It's not just humanities degrees that are the problem. The problem is the market is not actually in "high demand" like higher education advertises. Graduating CS students across the U.S. are turned down by employers constantly and end up working in a job that doesn't require their degree nor does it use any skills from it. I have multiple friends in this exact situation.
We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally fail and be taken over by real market demand education.
The problem with education was explored by Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education. Education is more about who you admit and less about what you teach.
Could you elaborate on CS graduates getting turned down? I've seen how much trouble companies have hiring, so the only reasons I'm coming up with are these graduates aren't willing to relocate or they studied CS because it pays well, but they're not actually that good at it. Something very underappreciated, and possibly the cause of the classic CS class bimodal distribution, is how many students live the stuff outside of school, so someone academically good at CS ends up competing with someone who has random open source projects, sysadmins a linux server, knows how to set up a network, and has a CS degree.
Not sure if this reference really applies. If you're not good enough to do the job, you're not good enough to do the job. We do seem to be overproducing college grads, but I've heard nothing like that for CS grads.
Companies do not have trouble hiring. They have trouble hiring high experience for entry level pay. They have trouble hiring people who know exactly how to solve their abstract set of requirements on a resume.
Your comment embodies the problem. If you expect CS students to have a wide array of specific work experience then you're siphoning experience and not creating any.
Companies should be much more concerned with teaching while building. Most of these students can do the work - they simply need an introduction to the specific special environment that company uses. But those companies refuse. Therefore they don't get workers. It's a self created problem.
It's also in line with basic market economics. Surplus of hiring candidates means you have more leverage.
Another proof is how often big name companies will do diversity hires that are not related to competancy. If there was such demand and competancy required then these would not happen.
Eidolon is a now defunct online magazine specifically about the classics. The last thing they did was publish a 'fail' essay. In it the head editor, who holds a PhD from Princeton in the Classics, goes through all the challenges, mis-steps, and lessons they all learned. 'Fail' essays in tech are a dime a dozen. But in the classics, they tend to be rare. As such, Eidolon's essay is a goldmine.
Two things stuck out to me the most:
1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities).
The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead.
Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and even Pre-Columbus America had complex cultural customs, art, math, engineering, medicine, language they handed down generationally.
University as we know it is a relic of Medieval European tradition.
I've seen the literacy rate of medieval Europe estimated at 10%. Ethics and morals were being taught roughly the same way they are now: you believe what your parents believed. Medieval medicine was being taught from translations of Arabic copies of Galen.
IIUC, the literacy rate was for most of the Mediterranean world was around 20%, specifically excluding slaves and women. Which is pretty high, actually.
The Greek schools of philosophy were taught by the equivalent of PhDs.
An (sadly? or rather realistically) that is what it boils down to, people who read the classics, read the classics, whether at Harvard or elsewhere. People who are critical thinkers, are critical thinkers, again whether at a college or elsewhere. People who X, X. To think that spending money (and increasing amounts of it) will change this is sheer insanity. Sure, you might get a few that otherwise would have never Xed to now X, but is it not just fundamentally inefficient? For every p that now Xs how many are still as lost? What would one do next?
Concerning the nurture component; Change their parents? Take the children away to be raised by a government?
I think people need to stop thinking about higher education in terms of financial yield. Or at least make it a much smaller piece of the metric.
If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life that isn't directly related to your occupation?
> or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree)
I so completely disagree. College/university is for education. If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load of money.
As an example lawyers and doctors don’t gain skills in law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced internships for that.
CompSci graduates can’t tell the difference because the software industry isn’t mature. In all other professional career paths there is some combination of licenses or certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.
Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers, carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist, a college degree is required unless you want your resume to go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e. nepotism).
The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact that most can't get employment in the first place without a degree, and internships don't pay the bills.
In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
> It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.
More what? Licenses? License != skills.
A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study per section.
Right, but what are the minimum requirements to become a software developer? A single 30 minute interview? There aren't any administrative or legal requirements. There is no minimum educational requirement.
Lots of software jobs have minimum educational requirements. When I did control systems software, an engineering degree (or the odd physics degree) was a hard requirement. Where I work now, certifications are mandatory and the interview process includes a real-world project + demonstration (which you're paid to complete).
You have this false impression that every software job has the same requirements. There are plenty of jobs where candidates have no hard requirements, but there is a large number that do have certification & degree requirements and/or rigorous interview processes.
Jobs building dating apps for dogs have substantially different requirements than one building brake control systems for cars, even if the job title for each is "software engineer."
"from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment "
I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick).
They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods.
Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?
A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.
>They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows theur production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
I agree, the unwashed masses do destroy most of everything. Granted Harvard is not what it used to be, same as an MS is not what it used to be, a Phd is not what it used to be. In the past the quality was even higher, more akin to an artisan workshop than whatever mass-anything you could conceive of.
Relatedly I read the top colleges try to get students they know they'll never admit to apply, because the more that apply, the more they can reject and the more selective they become.
Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
>A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.
Unless you recognize that human ability is not equally distributed. In which case colleges need to be exclusionary to maintain prestige. And that prestige is an important signal in a universe where success is dependent on competence.
Conversely, when prestige signals are eroded, there are gradual, self-reinforcing downstream effects, wherein all of our institutions - industry, media, government, academia - are gradually populated with cohorts of reduced competence, and society at large becomes less capable of recognizing merit, particularly given that when once clear signals like alma mater are no longer accurate, laypeople are more drawn to the nonsensical belief that all humans are equally capable.
And slowly the withering of these institutions, and recognition of/appreciation for competence, lead to a withering of society and, I think, this phenomenon is one of the drivers behind the ongoing collapse of the American Empire, for better or worse. The intent behind lowering standards for entry is amiable but based on a faulty and ultimately dangerous assumption.
It happens. University of Texas. At least parts of the University of California system. UMass Amherst is a pretty good school. At least main campuses of the upper tier of state universities can provide good educations. What's probably also true is that you can go to Ohio State and either take advantage of it or cruise through partying and taking X for jocks courses.
> In many other countries, top academics and researchers are at large public universities.
But that’s not even terribly relevant to the average student. An undergraduate won’t benefit from going down the same hallways as the world’s foremost expert on Nigerian guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having studied at the top university (in terms of research, not teaching) matters a lot.
The funny thing is how people constantly bemoan the state of politics, yet consistently argue for evaluating degrees entirely based on their financial outcome. As if an educated citizenry will just appear from the ether.
The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.
1. Before the post-WWII GI bill, which sent an enormous surge of young men to college in the 1950's, the percentage of Americans with a college degree was measured in single digits (Bachelor degrees then were as common as Ph.D.s today). And, yet, we still somehow managed to have a functioning democracy[1].
2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome simply because there is no other way to justify spending a quarter million dollars on a degree. That is an order of magnitude more than it costs to deliver a high quality education[2].
If college were truly just about learning, you could start cranking out college-educated citizens for $20k a pop. At price it's an easy decision to make. Instead, colleges have become luxury resorts with a classroom as one of the amenities. They compete on things like best food, recreation and nightlife. It's not (necessarily) a problem to bundle education with fun, but you have to justify the expense to your customers. Colleges have chosen to highlight the differences in earnings between those with degrees and those without.
[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.
[2] The cost of the primary input has decreased: Faculty salaries have been stagnant for 40 years--for a given "level". But faculty salaries have actually decreased when you account for "title deflation". Colleges increasingly rely on "adjunct" faculty and delay the promotion from assistant to full professor. It is now common for PhDs to do two or even three post-docs (which can include teaching duties) before getting a first appointment. Thus, a 40 year-old academic today has a lower title and costs less to employ than a 30 year-old academic from the middle of the 20th century.
"1950's, the percentage of Americans with a college degree was measured in single digits (Bachelor degrees then were as common as Ph.D.s today). And, yet, we still somehow managed to have a functioning democracy"
You could argue the world in 1950s was totally different, and today that education is necessary.
Alternatively you could take a view that the world was comparable enough to draw conclusions. But then, 1878 was 'equidistant' to 1950's, as 1950's is to today. That's the year US had witch trials. Lynching was still happening, and continued untill 1960's. Now I am willing to bet that folks here do not want to descend into barbarism, and that education has a huge role to play here.
> "[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders."
I read somewhere, but unfortunately can't remember where. That disaffected highly educated people stir up a lot of political trouble - so these things might be related in a causal way (though I'm a little skeptical).
I also wonder how much university just has people exchange one cultural belief system for another based on who is around them rather than learning how to think critically and independently.
My personal experience leads me to think that most people will just start to believe what everyone around them believes, I worry how much I'm affected by this too.
>[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.
Hitler had extreme disdain for academics. It's definitively a driving for polarization since it's so easy to draw the line. People who drop out/never enroll have a lot in common with each other and people who graduate have a lot in common with each other but once you compare college educated and high school educated people the overlap starts shrinking.
Nobody's saying we shouldn't have a well educated citizenry... the point that I was making was about whether it's worth going six figures into debt to become a well educated citizen. When you're investing that much money, it has to be a consideration.
Also, the idea that a four year degree has a monopoly on making people educated is just incorrect.
If you think it's the best thing for a society to have a well educated citizenry, then I hope you're working to get the government to pay for free college for everyone. The idea that people should have to make enormous personal financial sacrifice for the greater good of society is just bad.
>They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods.
If it was currently possible to take a group of 18 year olds, and transform them into highly motivated, highly intelligent people, I assume it would exist for sale.
Unfortunately, the construction of a person seems to be highly complex, and is subject to genetics, home life and parental wealth, childhood experiences, peer and other influences, etc.
Until then, humans will continue to use shortcuts for assessing the probability of one's future ability to "succeed" (however one wants to define it), one of which is attaining admittance at certain institutions.
"Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?"
They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in turn attracts the brightest students.
Why would I need a world class researcher for e.g. linear algebra? Lots of students struggle with it because of bad teaching, not because it's difficult to understand.
Who would you rather be taught by, someone who spends the rest of the week using what you are being taught, or someone interested in something else (at best, teaching itself, at worst, doing anything else)?
I might suspect bad linear algebra teaching is caused by a lack of interest in linear algebra by the teacher.
Having seen world-class researchers up close, and having experienced their teaching first-hand over many years, I don't believe that being one is any guarantee of also being the other.
Good researchers are not necessarily good teachers. Good teachers are not necessarily good researchers. But the best teachers in my experience are fiercely interested in their subjects, which they share with the best teachers.
I heard an interesting analogy that universities are more like religions than businesses. If you factor out all the beliefs/rituals in religion and knowledge/education in universities, they are both human organizations that seek to prolong/maximize their existence, rather than to grow or maximize shareholder value like in companies.
> Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?
In the end it doesn't make a difference. Employers want to hire good candidates. Hiring is hard and the outcomes asymmetric: very good candidates can give at most 10x performance and for a company with 100+ employees that barely registers, while very bad candidates can create absolutely stunning destruction. So hiring good candidates is a high stakes game. There's lots of noise, any way to get signal out of this noise is valuable. Employers pay big fees to recruiting agencies to get good hires. A reputable university, like Harvard or MIT is like an ideal recruiting agency (and no fees): not only it finds the best candidates for you, it also trains them for 4 years. The 4 years of training function as a further filter as well. In the end, someone graduating for such a college will be quite a sure bet for employers, and so they'll have much, much better prospects in the job market. So they are willing to pay for this. Are they born smart and Harvard does not teach them anything new? Who cares? They'll get much better job offers than if they graduate from Tulane, and that translates in more money in their pockets.
If you think that we have anything resembling a healthy market of affordable education, I'm afraid we're not going to agree on much of anything.
The point isn't about whether colleges are there for education or not, the point is that if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life you should get a return on that investment.
The idea that people should go enormously into debt to become educated for the sake of it is crazy. If you want to educate people for the sake of society, then get society to pay for their education. Until then, people need to make rational choices about what for many of them is the biggest financial commitment they'll make.
So long as the top tier universities are not expanding enrollments I fail to see what real change would come from more applications. Maybe they will get a bit more diverse. The lower tier schools will get their enrollment so long as the total demand is still there.
Actually, I'll argue that college educations can pay off in a third way. It's not just brand-name prestige and useful skills. There's a lot to be said for the way that four years of residential education imbues grads with a valuable lifetime network of allies.
The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics.
It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all.
What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.
>>I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college
While I agree with you and approached my university education with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment, open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc.
Whether any of these practical or experiential goals are most optimally met, in terms of time/life/money/effort expanded, through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and heated discussion entirely :)
> people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly.
So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.
Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree.
I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.
It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information" at a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.
Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities?
Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it?
> a rate that's so much higher than STEM education that it makes sense to divert tens of thousands of dollars to a humanities major instead of a STEM one.
Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.
More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.
In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.
> More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.
>So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.
Yes, the bottom line matters because it's paying for your education. If there is no bottom line you will have no education. Consider this, back in the day only the richest people send their children to colleges and universities. How did they become rich? By maximizing profits. So yes, profits come first, after you have those profits you can spend it on nonessential education.
The market is heavily subsidized, to the tune of the annual $120+ billion in Federally guaranteed grants and loans that the DOE boasts of being provided every year in its public letters. The loaning of such large sums to teenagers who don't yet understand basic financial cost/benefit analysis severely distorts the market.
When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow, desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of decades of compounding inflation by subsidy.
How is this an example of an efficient market when one of the outcomes is to simply get a “name-brand degree”?[1] Ideally it should just be about the other alternative, namely what you learnt.
Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity.
And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks.
Your second sentence is indicative of the toxic attitude to the world that appears to be rooted in or at least exacerbated by capitalism.
Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose that create other extremely important value in the world (the thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc) are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours, or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get scholarships?
Curious to see how this plays out in law schools — UPenn and UVA have seen 40%+ bumps in applications (guessing it’s even higher at HYS) while schools like Duquesne or Belmont are struggle busing.
I don't think it's a real trend. You only need to apply to one or two safety schools while you can apply to any number of good/reach schools. Those schools have made the admission process much more random. Used to be that your grades + SATs mostly determined who would accept you. Now it's whatever impressed some random admissions drone and who knows what they really want? So you shoot your shot with 40 reaches and hope one of them likes you. If you're a strong candidate you have to apply to more schools in case you get randomly rejected.
I guess I feel the opposite -- although I think the system of higher education is fundamentally broken in the US, I see this amplifying problems, not improving them.
Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people.
I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large.
I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.
> The Common App’s data does not include community colleges because they typically allow anyone to enroll. But those schools, which often provide low-income students a first step into higher education, also saw steep declines. In the fall of 2020, freshmen enrollment fell by more than 20 percent.
The two trends in the article are a 17% increase in applications for the most selective institutions and a 20% drop for community colleges.
The Times uses weasel words here
>some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019.
Meaning only some selective institutions, the Berklely increase in applications was because they waived the standardized test.
Knowing application patterns this is bad news - it means that poorer people, especially undergrads have not applied this year.
It is unlikely that those same people just turned around and applied to Cornell. I argue that the increase in apps to elite institutions is from people who left the workforce from good jobs. They are making a strategic move to weather the COVID storm and come out on the other side better off.
I've been regularly bemused by people graduating with a degree in X, and then bitterly complaining that nobody told them that the pay for X was very low.
I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".
For someone going to college, there are no excuses for not checking starting salaries with google before making a huge commitment.
Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.
Maybe if they charged reasonable prices they'd have more applicants. The university I went to let you go for free if you kept a 4.0 GPA and had high SAT scores.
Then you've created an extreme incentive for grade inflation, since professors know an A- could lead to a promising student getting kicked out over finances.
I hate GPA incentives because a lot of classes are subject to interpretation over whether you comprehend the material. Physics and math you can't lie. Programming has enumerable variations to a correct answer. General education classes are 100% up to how the instructor feels about your assignment that day.
> Even before the pandemic, Dr. Baldridge said, “the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting more and more challenged, in terms of institutions.”
Framing this as “rich” vs. “poor” is ridiculous. These “poor” institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper. There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I’m happy it’s finally happening.
Wherever you get more value out of the final certificate than the education involved, you are participating in systemic fraud and a bubble that will eventually pop.
I sense that the fundamental purpose for going to College has changed from "getting an education" to "building your brand" as an individual. I don't work in Human Resources, but as a software developer I do spend a lot of time around my company's recruiters and I'm involved in the hiring process. A candidate's alma mater has an outsized impact on the likelihood they will advance to the next step of the hiring process.
Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College". But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
> Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes.
I think most people do realize it, which is why we're seeing what's being written about in the article. People realize if you merely want to be educated, you can do that for cheap or free anywhere, but nobody in HR screening resumes cares if you're educated. They care that you have name-brand pedigree. I remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super smart and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier State school and not from Stanford and that was the end of it. It's very classist and ugly. If I graduated today from the school I graduated from in the mid-90s, I wouldn't have a job either.
As we all know, this is not just happening in education: All of society is bifurcating into a few winners, and a lot of losers, and a shrinking number in the middle. Everything is has become a slug-fest where the many compete with each other in a high-stakes game for the few viable good opportunities, leaving the rest in ruin.
The longer I watch this unfold the more become convinced that the US is a giant social experiment to see what happens when you apply profit-maximization to literally everything.
Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to the pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number of losers.
Wonder when this'll fall apart (if ever). I guess it's a good thing the majority of people worldwide are not exposed to this and therefore potentially get the benefit to observe and learn from it. Take care.
> Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to the pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number of losers.
You forgot the key: Split the "losers" roughly 50-50 along some carefully crafted political/ideological lines, and have them fight each other rather than unite and fight the pimps.
> I remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super smart and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier State school and not from Stanford and that was the end of it.
If HR has anything to do with how engineers are selected there's something wrong with the company.
They are there to schedule interviews and take care of the paperwork.
Recruiters (part of HR) select the subset of resumes that an engineer (IC or manager) will then pick from to have an actual (phone) interview.
It really sort of has to work that way. The volume and variance in quality is just overwhelming. There is no way someone technical could look at every resume.
Yeah, that's not how it works for a majority of jobs in America. I'm 100% sure that's true for top companies in world cities, but it just isn't true even in most of the top 100 cities in the US. And believe it or not, there really are top companies that look at actual accomplishments and skillsets and not your CV. Incredulous, I know.
You'd be very mistaken if you think there aren't managers out there with the power to do their own hiring. It's not hard.
Most companies are lucky if they can even find someone ranging from competent to excellent for a given role. It's hard enough to do that. And if you land on an excellent candidate, most don't know how to retain them, because it's not economically feasible to do so. They leave, because they're consistently looking to maximize their earnings, or they're smart enough to start their own business.
This probably just reflects greater uncertainty in the application process due to lack of standardized test scores. In other years, have a better sense of where they stand and can strategize appropriately (i.e. a few aspirational applications and a few safety schools). This year things are much less clear. It may not be a long term trend, or may not accelerate a long term trend.
Scott Galloway made a prediction last summer of what colleges and universities will thrive, survive, struggle, or face challenges given the current situation. Basically, the higher ed market will consolidate around more elite schools.
per usual I believe the issue here is that the government has been subsidizing schools which have created strange distortions. if Harvard were strictly private and received no government subsidies, funding or advantage a few things would happen:
1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend
2) it would be substantially more expensive
3) the acceptance rate would be much higher
ideally this would result in schools like UMass Amherst (which ironically is the best public university in Massachusetts - weird considering other states have better state flagships, but that's another issue) being able to compete far more effectively.
why would a smart poor kid ever go to UMass when you could go to Harvard for free? it has never made sense that you get better financial return from say, MIT, even though it costs the same as RandomPrivateU.
Harvard is probably a bad example because their endowment is so large that they could afford to give substantial scholarships to poor students even without government subsidies. The issue is more with the 3rd-tier private schools.
Smart hiring managers in this industry know that college doesn't matter and that one good Github project > any degree. I've not once taken someone's schooling into consideration while interviewing and I've hired dozens of people.
I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do, but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a lot harder to do if you have no money since you can't get a government loan to cover your expenses. UBI would be very helpful here.
Lots of students who go to lower tier schools don't even know that their 'elite' peers are working on things like projects, OSS, or interview prep. I personally had never heard of a hackathon until after I started uni, but lots of my classmates had already been to dozens in high school. The real issue with going to a bad college is students have no idea what they're supposed to do to get a job. Those students are dead last in a game they don't even know they're playing. It happens organically at a good school.
In my experience most elite school CS students don't actually work on OSS. I see a lot of school projects posted to Github. That's why I like to look at it, because it's hard to fake.
You're right that it's harder for people who don't have the resources to buy computers and spend time learning/hacking. I've hired several really good devs who only had an HS degree but also had an OSS project, but a lot of people just won't have the resources to make that happen.
There are a lot of people in this thread talking about how important a big name college is. As a counterpoint... If you are not trying to work for a FANG company within your first ~3 years of graduating I don't think a big name college with a great CS program matters at all.
A Carnegie Mellon degree may help you get more interviews and therefore land your first job if you are struggling otherwise but its likely the person with the Kent State CS degree and the Illinois Urbana Champaign CE degree are not applying for the same jobs right out of school.
After the first few years education becomes less important and actual skills become far more important. Again this is more true at non FANG/SV/Start up type companies. Which is where most engineers will work for the majority of their career.
A huge generational change is that young people can just google "best X" for every life decision instead of caring about what they're exposed to organically. What job to do, city to live in, how to dress, etc. They can also find a community and detailed guides for achieving pretty much anything they want, so the special in-group knowledge isn't a barrier anymore. Anyone familiar with the whole tech interview prep culture should be able to understand that similar cultures exist for everything from academia to online dating. The downside is that the upper tier of everything is a lot more competitive so it's harder to win without gaming the system.
This comment has a critical undertone but I think it's pretty much right. Thinking back, when I was 17 and applying for college, deciding what schools you should apply to was a really murky process. Most people pretty much depended on reputation & word-of-mouth, and nobody even talked about schools outside the state. On top of that, a 17 year old has had little time to accrue knowledge of various schools. Whereas today you can find an endless trove of information from your bedroom to feed your decision.
the information available and advertised to most 17-year-olds (back when I was browsing: US News, College Confidential) isn't much of an improvement. In my case the former relies on a bunch of bunk data and weird metrics for evaluation, while the latter mostly revolved around very coarse word-of-mouth reputation.
I have a hard time believing this. Information was murky and information asymmetry was a big reason lots of people seemed to just apply to a flagship state u rather than look at more far flung or prestigious options, though the state u is prestigious in it's own right. There's certainly more noise now, but there's also a lot more signal (maybe the ratio is the same though). I suspect there's really fantastic info out there that's way more than I had applying to colleges way back when in 2010.
I'd be interested in doing an experiment to act like I'm in high school and want all the info on college applications and to see where I end up.
The info was available to me back in 1992. Somebody at your high school, typically called a "guidance counselor", would have it. It was available in a thick paperback book. I could also use an Apple II program if I preferred.
From there I picked: Rice, Rutgers, MIT, Worchester Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Virginia Polytechnic. Clearly, that was not just one state.
After picking, phone the schools. Ask them to send applications. More applications may arrive by surprise if you do well on the SAT or ACT.
When an application arrives, put it in a typewriter and carefully type into all the fields in the form. Send it by mail, physically, and wait to get mailed a response.
What is an improvement is information about income and job placement from various institutions and degrees.
It's almost trivial to chart one's income possibilities based on where you graduate from and what degree you get. The knowledge about how to get into a tech job, or a high finance job, or get into medical school, or get hired by a top legal firm is available to everyone whereas it was limited before to those who knew people who knew these things.
We know what cities and suburbs of those cities will lead to maximal probabilities of "success", we know which schools have the highest achieving kids (or the ones with the richest parents), etc. It saves a lot of time to be able to filter real estate listings by greatschools.org metrics before.
This is a really big deal for things like personal finance or financial independence that required knowledgeable networks to understand important early decisions and the right thing to do.
Now I can read about this stuff on reddit and learn the basics of how everything works.
A bright kid with an internet connection can leverage that even if they're in a social network or community that doesn't understand any of these things.
The remaining problem is unknown unknowns. If you don't know what exists, it can be hard to know what to ask. You can't search 'Best X' when you don't know what X is. If you're online though, you may be able to see someone mention it and go from there.
Well, of course. Going to college during the epidemic is not cost effective. Many colleges are trying to charge full on-campus prices while delivering "distance learning". Better to wait a year and get the full experience.
I prefer distanced learning. It's probably my school but the majority of the comp sci students are slackers and drag the people who do this stuff down. As shown by the fact that it's harder for these lazy students to mooch of the actual hard working ones. Really hard to pretend being someone's friend with an email versus sitting next to the smart kid.
The article doesn't mention the demographic bomb in the US. 2019 births were 3.7 million. boomers were 4 million a year; would need to be 7 million to be proportional to the population then. 2020 and 2021m births are projected to be as low as 3 million due to pandemic nears.
In addition to low births, student immigration has been severely restricted in recent years by federal policy.
This is absolute correct. Many state universities added campuses very actively back in the 1950s and 60s to accommodate the boomers who all wanted college degrees.
It would be interesting if colleges offered a reduced or free tuition in exchange for future earnings. That might incentivize colleges to only offer certain degrees, help with job placements, keep the quality of learning high, etc.
The key difference between the parent commenter's proposal and a loan, is that the proposal ties the amount paid back to the income of the graduate.
The thinking is that conditions would be structured to better ensure the college degree provides suitable income (only for certain majors, only if the college provides certain data about grads, etc).
I still don't understand why college degrees are necessary for the majority of jobs in the US other than a surplus of college educated folks. This is particularly problematic given the high cost of education.
The entire post secondary education system in Germany is focused on specialization in a given field of study (at universities) or vocational training. The advantage here is that there is no financial penalty for choosing the wrong path, only missed opportunity cost due to time spent.
I completed my secondary school in Germany at a typical Gymnasium (the highest tier of the three major secondary school types). Note that my parents did not attend college and aren't wealthy. Around 8th grade my school curriculum exceeded their knowledge. I attended a private liberal arts college in the US as an international student where I relied on (private) scholarships and (private) loans [international students cannot get subsidized loans -- generally interest rates are high and interest accumulates even while enrolled in school].
The only reason why I chose to attend university was because I wanted to gain an advanced understanding of mathematics and I aspired to one day become a college professor (this has since changed of course).
Despite my school being very highly ranked and my hard work producing good academic results it simply did not have the brand reputation to unlock opportunities such as even being invited to phone screens. I had to take a roundabout way to get into my career and instead work my way up from less desirable positions.
This focus on brand for academic institution is also something you do not generally find in Germany where the criteria is typically the binary question of whether or not you have a particular degree in a particular subject area (though again the vast majority of jobs do not require a degree).
Too often I observed the candidate with a Bachelor's at ~3.0 GPA from say Stanford being preferred over the candidate with a ~4.0 from a lesser known but equally rigorous institution.
Of course this focus on brand continued beyond college. I quickly learned that a less desirable / impactful role at a top company opens more doors than top positions at unknown companies.
Call me pessimistic, but I do not advise people to attend college in the US unless they can attend schools with a very strong brand and extensive alumni network in their desired professional field.
Looking back at my education my secondary education in Germany was more formative and critical than my college education in the US. While I did have the opportunity to take advanced coursework in college here in the US it did not prepare me for generic jobs not specific to my field of study (and barely even is an asset in my profession). I believe we need to improve high school education in this country and reverse the trend of requiring a college education for the majority of jobs.
What could we do with college campuses assuming some proportion of them go out of business in the coming years/decades? It would make for an immediate walkable city with all the infrastructure already built out.
As someone who never did well with standardized tests, it’s frustrating to see evidence like this of how heavily they are still weighed in the college admissions process, even though it isn’t surprising.
If I were applying to universities today and had otherwise good credentials but difficulties performing on standardized tests like the SATs, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of remorse for trying to cheat in a rigged system.
What are your thoughts on standardized tests as the most standard (not sure what a better word is here) comparison between applicants?
I recognize that a lot has been written about the SAT/etc being biased, but high school grades and "experiences" are worse (how does one compare what a "B" in Calculus or club president actually means, in all high schools across the US??).
I agree with you that comparing applicants objectively is a tough nut to crack. I don’t know the right answer but I would imagine looking at as diverse a set of inputs as possible is a good starting point; I could also see universities coming up with some means of weighing inputs differently to not let any one input (like standardized test scores) be an arbitrary disqualifier. But until that’s the case, I don’t think individuals should feel guilt for not letting a flawed system run them over, even if that means needing to “cheat”.
I definitely agree with individuals taking actions within the system to optimize their chances is fine (e.g. targeting colleges that don't require standardized testing if the applicant doesn't do well on those tests, but not things like the fake sports recruiting that was in the news a year or so ago).
I may be biased as I did well on standardized tests. I have family members that volunteer to do admissions interviews as alumni of a very major name university. They both mention how gamified some applicants are taking the process, with some high school students' parents essentially buying them research opportunities and other experiences to talk about on their applications. While standardized testing is influenced by family wealth and resources, I'm convinced standardized tests (SAT/ACT/AP/etc) are the least influenced part of college admissions, and thus should remain in some form.
Given the incredible scarcity of academic jobs and huge surplus of Ph.D. graduates, I'd be surprised if even relatively unknown schools in the middle of nowhere couldn't attract hundreds of highly qualified applicants.
Landing a faculty job at any university - public or private - is an extraordinary achievement.
This isn't terribly surprising given the degree of substitutability between very inexpensive community colleges (or state schools like CSUs here in California) and mid/lower-tier privates.
Pre-pandemic, going to college away from home offered a fun environment with many amenities. During the pandemic, these fun aspects are greatly limited (and parents might not let kids go anyway, due to health risks). When you take away so much of the fun stuff that goes along with college, it doesn't make as much sense to pay $50k/yr in tuition when the experience isn't that much different than your local state school (which costs $10k).
Top colleges, on the other hand, still offer differentiation in terms of degree prestige. Add onto that the promise of not taking standardized tests into account (as the article notes Cornell and other schools are doing this), and it's not surprising that applications are up.
Community colleges are the best deal in education (though they usually don't offer four-year degrees.)
And given the academic job market, basically any state university should be able to pick and choose among hundreds of highly qualified faculty candidates.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 289 ms ] threadAt a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to jump through, or anything else, but that’s a different argument.
I think you're confusing depth and breadth. It's like the Harbor Freight coupon. Everyone gets 20% off with a few exclusions. But the people paying less than 80% (to continue the Harbor Freight metaphor) are few and far between.
There were exceptions, particularly for wealthy folks and people who were 'on the line' income-wise, but the majority got significant financial aid.
Just to give you an idea, from MIT's stats[1]:
* Average need-based MIT scholarship: $47,593
* Students awarded a need-based MIT scholarship: 59%
* Students attending tuition-free: 31%
* Class of 2019 graduates with no student loan debt: 76%
* Average student loan debt for those who borrowed: $23,226
The trope that the expensive schools are the cause of the massive student loan debt problem is just that; a trope. When only 24% of the class graduates with any debt at all, I'm not convinced MIT (and similar) are the problem. This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
[1] https://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html
This is largely due to MIT and similar schools having massive endowments from which they can draw for Financial Aid; there are cheaper schools, certainly, but they have coffers that are less deep (referring to private schools), meaning students end up having to take more debt.
It is reality that expensive schools cause the massive student loan debt problem, but expensiveness isn't totally buried in sticker price but total cost of attendance. Schools like HYSM don't saddle attendees with as much debt despite their high sticker price perhaps because of endowments.
https://admissions.yale.edu/affordability-details
Boston area schools being "basically free on paper" to middle income families is a reflection of the fact that a student from a ~100k income family has better options for getting ahead in the world than attending these institutions at any cost but these institutions would lose legitimacy without "economic diversity" tokens so they have to reduce the price. Going to Harvard (or similar) if you're not from the kind of people who go to Harvard is a high risk, high reward gamble with years of your life. These schools have to reduce the potential downside in order to get the quality of candidates they want to get from the demographics they want to get them from (i.e. they want to be able to pick the very best people from the "can't afford to attend" demographic). Also it's good PR.
If you're the son of a plumber and your options are going to MIT for CS, or UMaine's "we match your local in-state tuition" deal paired with their crappy CS program the Maine one actually looks attractive because you're going to be surrounded by people a heck of a lot more like you (on a life experiences level), you're not gonna be bottom of your class and you won't be running the Boston rat race when it comes to housing, a part time job, commuting, and all the other "life" stuff". If you're the kind of high-achieving individual who goes to Harvard from a middle class background you're all but guaranteed to live more comfortably than your parents and retire comfortably regardless of the choice you make. Rolling a degree from a lesser state school into a stable job at BigCo isn't something you're worried about. The networking value add from Harvard or MIT isn't as much of a value add because you have no frame of reference for it and won't be making the kinds of life choices where it can be most helpful anyway (remember, no safety net, you're gonna be the one that builds it). So if you're gonna "win" no matter what you choose why add the additional risk of Harvard, MIT or some other program you could wash out of?
I suppose at some point someone has to pay. But you're not rich at $90k. And I just don't see many of those households earning between $90-250k a year wanting to pay for such a privilege.
From my perspective, you've got to be either very rich, or very poor going into those schools, because there's no reasonable room for those in-between unless you're taking out significant life-changing debt to do so.
And after it's all said and done, you're overwhelmingly statistically unlikely to be making so much that the debt didn't even matter.
unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.
None of those median salaries put you in the 'wealthy' category.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cba.pdf
There's no obligation for parents to pay for their kids education, yet the way the system is set up, you'd think there was.
There's no (as yet generally accepted) obligation for anyone else to pay for young adults higher education. Society has generally chosen to subsidize some costs for young people who seek such subsidy using formulas which assume that parents of means will also do so, but this does not reflect an obligation of parents to do so.
This is in fact exactly what's happening. It's impossible to bankrupt out of student loans, so in theory it's a no risk loan from the loan providers perspective.
Schools almost never totally phase out financial help, but they do reduce it to negligible portions e.g. $500 work study on a 50k bill. This helps keep their financial aid stats healthy while still getting paid.
This type of affect will only show up when viewing the percentiles of debt students are taking on. Adding a bunch of folks who only take on $1k in debt is a great way to draw down the average.
Something is really rotten with this country if the only tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a “better life” (though people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter factual outcome if you don’t get into an elite institution).
If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them with a $12/hr job at graduation.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of what recent college grads with English degrees make? I mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury themselves in that much debt without a very clear path out of it.
I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English degree is required, you can get that at a much more affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew they would have a really hard time paying that off...
If you realize 2 years in that you're down ~60k, and a 5 year program will cost an extra 40k then you aren't going to change majors.
Umass Amherst is only ~25% more expensive than Umass Dartmouth on paper ( or at least was when I was attending ).
For myself, I got a physics degree and flipped into software engineering - I went bust in my first 2 years out of school but I was able to put things together and paid off my debt comfortably. The debt did ensure I stopped pursuing grad school for physics as the math became impossible to justify.
I appreciate that this comment can be read two different ways.
But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects.
What people have been saying in this thread is not incorrect (though should be nuanced): the ivy leagues are worth it for the caliber of the student body and reputation; otherwise, go to a (Tier 1) public school.
Unless, of course, you don’t want to and can easily afford otherwise.
What matters a lot more than the name of the institution on your degree is experience; getting that experience may be a bit tougher at a small school (you don't have FAANGs or huge biotech firms recruiting there), but it is certainly not impossible.
Three of the last four engineers I hired had no formal CS degree (but they had gone to bootcamps).
Isn't Northeastern still a big cooperative education school?
I assure you that those of us in engineering know the difference between a student with work experience and one with only academic experience.
Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt burden was much lower.
Umnass opens doors in MA the way smoking pot makes it easier to make friends in college. You instantly have some token thing in common with a sizeable minority of the people around you and that gets you a head start on developing relationships.
I did ok in college and very well in the private sector. I started as a sysadmin for a small finance company and am now a senior software engineer at Amazon Alexa working on ML for search. Hard work always pays off as long as your in the right field ( comp-sci is a great field ).
Once you've done something in the industry, almost no one is going to give a hoot about what school you went to, they're going to care about what you've done in the industry, but at the start at least, you may have to settle for something a little shittier.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-student-loan-debt
If you’re trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
If the school isn’t actually good at education then it fails.
True alignment of incentives.
Often when people say this, I've found they're really just using it as a proxy for status or prestige rather than education or critical thinking.
I agree with it in the abstract, but disagree with its use in practice.
A valuation based on immediate financial value turns universities into trade schools (which to be fair, more people need / are really looking for).
And also it would turn universities in to not-very-good trade schools. Why would they train school teachers or social workers when they make so little money?
Metrics change what they observe, unless you are extremely careful, usually for the worse.
The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.
Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.
The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
Many skills are not like computer programming. You're not learning physical therapy from coursera, or even something like human resources; some things you need others for to mentor, correct, guide, or provide facilities for.
(NB: Talking about in the US)
Maybe we should not pretend that hiring is this optimally tuned machine that knows exactly whats needed
If I were hiring pilots, to go with the physical quality example, I would discriminate on height. You can be too short to operate an aircraft, and you can be too tall or too big to fit in some aircraft (I knew a helicopter pilot who only flew helicopters because he couldn't, physically, fit in fighter aircraft which had been his dream job). But if I were running an airline, I wouldn't use this as a discriminator on all my employees, only the ones that it made sense for.
Degrees ought to be treated similarly in white collar jobs.
I dare you to provide an explanation that is not illegal and/or deranged.
One is employees who are deeply in debt can be more easily abused than, for example, wealthy skilled tradesmen. You can do all kinds of things to woman with a student loan debt larger than a mortgage and she'll have to put up with it, whereas a journeyman electrician, in addition to being paid more, would simply move to a competing jobsite the next day.
The other reason is colleges highly promote diversity in freshmen accepted class statistics but always cover up graduating diploma holder statistics. You can kind of legally/illegally guarantee you hire a white woman or certainly tilt the odds against PoC, by demanding the office receptionist hold a bachelors degree in something "to maintain office culture because everyone else in the office went to college and we wouldn't want her to feel left out". Presumably those type of places where PoC need not apply, will soon require their janitors to have a four year degree in some sort of liberal art...
You would like to find people with the following characteristics: They can follow complex instructions with minimal oversight, they finish what they start, they have good social skills to work with colleagues and occasional outside parties, they are fully literate (i.e., spell well, read quickly, understand context), and can be trained and managed.
You're handed 300 resumes. How do you select the top 10-15 that are most likely to satisfy the requirements?
What would be your initial filtering criteria?
Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
University is also a social exercise, which can serve to signal that you are okay or at least exposed to the type of cultural norms that might exist at an employer that is already full of similarly college educated people.
> Obviously, once you have work experience and letters of reference, no one cares about your college. But you're not going to have that when you're 18.
That's actually not the case, unfortunately. My wife is fluent in two languages, can read and communicate in a couple more but isn't fluent, has 12+ years of experience, and letters of reference from CFOs and CEOs from major international corporations, and is struggling (here in the US) to get a non-minimum wage job in a medium sized city (we'd be better off if we were in a larger city, but this is where my work is right now).
My point was more that the signal an elite college serves is relatively short lived assuming you then get experience at highly regarded employers. For example, once you have worked at a FAANG, no one cares if you went to a low ranked school.
But it's not. It gives a good indication that the applicant has many, if not all, of the characteristics I listed.
And for many non-specialist jobs (data entry, call center, executive assistants, etc.) there is no relevant training program or certification. Few people grow up hoping to work at a call center or do data entry, so they're not going to go to school for that.
Again, a 4-year degree does not guarantee success, but it tells an employer far more than they were "willing to spend $40-80K for a piece of paper." Many people want to go to school to learn about something they love, then they get out and need a job.
I think it's fair for a hiring person to seek out degree holders as a desirable criteria.
As it is right now, being an average human in a developed country doesn't pay because there are lots of average humans in developing countries who are begging for work harder than you do.
More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.
And yet the country is attracting talent more than it exports it!
Guaranteed student loans in combination with private college simply doesn't work.
The way you zone your cities is causing widespread social problems.
Arresting people for doing drugs doesn't rehabilitate them.
It's not a dystopia, it's just lots of short sighted policies that cause long term failures.
Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself.
Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.
*big caveat for hard sciences of course
In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.
Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting.
And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job.
Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
I kind of feel it may be a made up field to promote forms of Marxism and not something that actually contributes much to the body of human knowledge. Nothing entirely wrong with that either if it's something a person is into, it's just, well, we might actually be better off with less sociology students. The half baked and non realistic ideas that come out of that cause problems in the real world.
The reason I feel this is not from outside observation but because I spent a bunch of time in sociology classes many years ago. 4 as I recall. I wish I'd spent the time in extra math classes and I believe the world would be better off if people did.
The number of people going to college to increase their future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.
Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class).
Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
But to address your point:
> The problem with community colleges is that you completely miss out on any meaningful networking. As long as all the best students see it as beneath them, you'll have a hard time meeting people in a community college who can actually help your career
Since the instructor I had was a well known local musician, he actually called me up a few times for a gig, and I have done quite a bit of networking that way. I think you would be surprised just what type of networking oppritunities are actually are at a decent community college.
Like I said in my comment:
> I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
One of the best entry-level folks I have ever met we found this way. He is an incredibly hard and smart worker, but did not have the money to go to a four year university. So he went to community college, and a colleague of mine who taught there offered him a job as he was a student. Now he has a four year degree (he was able to pay his way through college with that job) and is one of the best contrbutors to that group.
Classic microeconomics vs macroeconomics problem. Individuals can always improve but you can't extend "just pull yourself up by your bootstraps harder" to an entire civilization. An individual benefits personally by going to Yale, if they can. You can't fix a national education system by making the official strategy telling kids their only hope is getting into Yale. Especially if there's an alternative that actually works for the masses, like CC.
CCs are mostly there either for cheap transfer credits, or technical programs for local industry; things like cad/cam, aviation tech, etc.
There were a lot of classes I saw (and some I took) at Universities that were just as bad, if not worse.
I would say they have a wide variety, much like universities. I have generally had a pretty good experience doing it for non-credit (i.e. education for it's own sake).
However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.
I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
“The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students.
Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”
Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc.
If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
Ya, and the acting students can learn about "compliers" online too. Outside of a garage startup, an engineer is useless if they cannot integrate into a larger team through the spoken and written word. I've run into BS students who haven't read a book since highschool. I've met compsci masters students who still panic if asked to stand up and explain their work to a large group. If a few hours learning about theatre helps solidify your language and presentation abilities, maybe it should be mandatory.
Students should just join a toastmasters
when we are paring costs, its best to keep the colleges to the very bare minimum of what they do well.
The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand.
> Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for tier 3.
When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier colleges don't actually have the product that's in demand. So they can charge basically nothing since they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a business (unless they lie to students who don't know better and pretend that they're selling prestige they don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit ones are explicitly this.
If they actually provided valuable education that'd be different, but they largely don't.
I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education.
Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or economically viable on their own.
Actual education is super powerful, it's just a diminutive part of what Universities have become and they're not very good at it.
Actually, the top schools would benefit from these the most. With close to 100% employment rates and better median salaries than anyone else.
> Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
I wonder how much income stream is coming from underperforming programs at modern Universities. For some of them it must be substantial. And I'm also wondering if some of them also redirect the income toward more useful programs or research.
The top schools don't need ISAs because they're selling prestige they can charge a lot more for. Since they're so highly selective they can admit only students who will succeed anyway.
Maybe over time that prestige will change, but I don't see that as near-term. I think it'd be better if they did ISAs, I just don't think they'll want to (or their ISAs will be worse for students than Lambda School's).
Right now top schools can charge up front and it doesn't really matter what they provide.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that assertion.
It's almost like a shibboleth: only those who actually went to the school will recognize the prestige.
You have clearly never studied Ancient Greek.
In a sense, studying Ancient Greek in depth is impossible as many ideas are lost in the modern cultural decline.
I've had the opposite experience.
In engineering/math, I've seen it swing both ways. Some professors couldn't be bothered to teach, because are so busy w/ their research and/or jaded w/ the University: implicit assumption is to baby the undergrads and shepherd them along the system. In regards to funding in relation to teaching ability, one way to look at it is that a PI is in essence a salesman, you have to sell your vision to get funding/appointments, sell your lab to get good phd candidates, and sell the subject to undergrad as something that is interesting and worthy of learning.
Think of a research group like any other business. You have to create a product and sell it, except the product is publications and publicity.
Related, university presidents are fundraisers first, ie selling their nonprofit to donors, in exchange for buildings, chairs, spots on committees (for poors), fuzzie-wuzzies, etc.
I suspect a lot of this is because of enormous amounts of risk-free (to the schools) money from the government.
Also, different degrees definitely cost different prices - the cost of an MBA is far higher than the cost of a masters in history, for example.
Also anecdata, but I've observed no such correlation. In the sciences I've seen the opposite - that Nobel prize winners (or similar) can be terrible at teaching undergraduates, and even poor mentors for grad students. Some faculty even seem to resent teaching introductory or undergraduate courses. In contrast, I've found many graduate students still remember what it was like to be a beginner trying to learn and understand the material for the first time. (Though not all of them are great lecturers.)
That being said, in CS I've found many Turing award type faculty to be fantastic lecturers (and occasionally acceptable graduate advisors.)
Overall, I'd put my money behind the incentives: at a large research university, tenure is based on 1) research grants, 2) research productivity, publication, and reputation. The university will pay lip service to teaching (both mentoring graduate students and teaching undergraduates) but it is usually a distant third if it is actually considered at all.
It's not a coincidence that the university and faculty will talk about a "teaching load" - i.e. a burden that one is supposed to endure that distracts from the primary goals of fundraising and research.
I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.
Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.
Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"?
I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden.
Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.
Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
> why are all degrees four years?
UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)".
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree?
Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition)
It would be interesting to understand how they set the prices.
You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays for both.
In the German system only the best students are admitted period -- there is no university available for 2/3 of the population. And it only lasts 3 years. You would also be shocked to learn that the US government spends more per capita subsidizing tertiary education than the German government. Except that we also allow non-subsidized students the option of attending at their own cost, so at least they have more options than in the German system, where University education is simply unavailable to them.
Germany is actually a couple of places above the US in the education index (that measures years of schooling): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
Additionally most vocational schools (Fachhochschule) are also free/cheap in Germany and Austria so even those pupils who can't get into university can still get affordable education.
In the US if you have a checkbook and pulse there will be a university that will accept you regardless of your test scores. Not every university, not MIT, but Joe Bob State will take you. Universities even offer remedial education programs so those who are barely literate and innumerate can still enroll, stay longer, and graduate from the university. In Germany you would have been routed out of the system and rerouted to a vocational school, which you are lumping in with a university education by using the vague word "study". "Anyone can study". Well, anyone can study at a library in the US, too, but we are talking about admission to university.
Many of these kids shouldn't go to Uni, and end up taking 5+ years to graduate.
In Germany most of these kids would go to a trade school or apprenticeship.
Still, that's a large burden. There are government programs that provide a mix of non-repayable grants and deferred payment loans to people who qualify based on family income. I don't have too much personal experience with them, but I think the intent (and, for the most part, effect) is that economic ability shouldn't be a barrier for attendance.
Not saying others are cheap, but just looking at waterloo is probably not represtative.
College costs around the world:https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-college-costs-aroun...
It is largely free if your means are limited. I’m in 4th year of mathematics at Waterloo right now and all but $170 of my $4300 tuition this term was paid for by government grants and bursaries.
Waterloo is actually even more expensive for international students. Some that I know are paying ~$3000 per half credit (5.0 credits per year is the norm) and that’s just in mathematics, not software engineering.
What 18 year olds have any means at all? Surely everyone passes this means test?
There's the FAFSA[1] required by almost every college. Many private colleges also require the CSS Profile[2] which is far more detailed and intrusive. Many people agree that the colleges do this for maximizing their profit and/or providing an incentive to go where it's "less than sticker".
Some 18 year olds are not on good terms with their parents and can't get their parents to complete the processes. Not sure what happens then but you'd suspect nothing good.
[1] https://studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid/fafsa Free Application for Federal Student Aid
[2] https://cssprofile.collegeboard.org
I ended up going for pretty close to free after scholarships anyways, though she did joke about consummating the marriage so I guess I missed out on that.
I wonder what happens if your parents are wealthy and you're on good terms with them and not estranged... they just don't happen to want to fund your education.
It also depends on the province (most funding is at the province level).
> Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care.
Ohh don't worry, what they don't pay in insurance fees they pay in taxes and fees.
The US spends a metric ton on medical expenses any way so a qualifier for Canadians like that doesn’t seem right.
nailed it
Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2 of those personally).
In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was the experience at my public college, as well as that of almost everyone else I talked to.
But it wasn't much of a concern at GT, because of the statewide Hope/Zell Miller scholarship covering the tuition based on the credit hours (and not on the actual semesters, you just have to have GPA high enough to qualify, which wasn't that high at all). So if you wanted to speedrun it and risk your GPA, you could do that. But if you wanted to take it slower, that scholarship allowed you to do so, because they paid regardless of how many years you took to graduate, as long as you were full time (with some nuances around part-time that aren't worth getting into right now), had high enough GPA, and you werent over the total cap of credit hours needed to graduate from your program.
While keeping 3.0 at GT might be a fairly difficult task, it is more than doable, and it wouldn't be considered by most GT students as some ungodly achievement. For comparison, the average GPA for fraternity members at Georgia Tech for Spring 2020 was 3.7 (which is higher than the average GT student GPA, but not by some crazy amount, and I think is a pretty good proxy for showing that 3.0 is not something that only a small number of students can achieve).[0]
0. https://fraternity.gatech.edu/51879_GATech_Guide.pdf
One semester is designed with a particular set of prerequisites in mind. Most times, one prerequisite holds back every other class on the career path. So, if you don't take that one class that semester, you can only take the elective courses until you take that class. Which means that when you run out of electives, what was supposed to be one semester becomes two, with the only course you qualify for in the second being the one you missed (this isn't necessarily true for the spring semester, since you could take the missing class during the summer.)
This is fine, but it leads to a disparity; taking on more classes than the recommended workload has a pretty linear correlation with decreased time to a degree (though the problem still persists that you don't qualify for your next classes); but taking on less than the recommended often jumps straight to doubling the time needed for a degree, with very little room in-between.
My personal example: decided to ignore most of the general studies classes I could ignore (aka those that weren't prereqs for any major-related classes, like most social studies) for the first year, did two 14-16 hour semesters for the first year, about 12 hours (each semester) for the second and third year (aka minimum required to be considered full time), took one fall semester off and then did one summer semester instead, and then finished off my last year with two back-to-back 22-24 hour semesters (during which I took a lot of those classes I ignored during my first year).
My school let us do it pretty much free-form, and it was amazing. Taking all the important major-related classes early on let me become knowledgeable enough for internships before a lot of peers (since I ended up taking some important major classes a semester or two ahead instead of taking gen ed classes like a lot of others did at the time), and during my last year I got a bit of a break by taking some of those "general ed" classes that most of my peers took early on.
I love this system, because it allows people to balance it all as they see fit. Some people would like to get all the gen ed classes out of the way first. Some would want to save them for last. Some would like to take them regularly at a "one general ed class per semester" pace. Some people would like to just do 16 credit hours every semester. Some would like to slow down at times and them ramp up heavily at times (which is what I did). Some would like to graduate early, others would like to take their time. Whichever style works for you.
And yeah, we had a general guideline for every major, with every class planned out every semester serving as a "sample workload", but it was just a guideline. Most people followed it to a degree, but not close. Others completely threw it out of the window, because they sorta knew what and how they wanted to do it. I think it is helpful to have for those who don't want to plan out things to their max efficiency and just want to not worry about it. But it isn't something that everyone is forced to abide by, it is more like an advice.
Some engineering programs are a five-year bachelors, due to a requirement to have a 1-year internship. Yet, other universities offer a 5-year BS+MS engineering program.
It's not the same everywhere. Cross the border to Quebec and it's a flat rate (every program is the same).
I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality.
This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements.
It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings.
What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.
Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of.
Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that.
I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return.
LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different.
- They cap return to 30k.
- They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year.
- They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).
This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.
This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.
Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.
A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does.
CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less.
The current system harms the poor.
As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action.
If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.
Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree.
It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent.
Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids.
Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.
What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?
A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.
Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose.
That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics.
A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.
Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame.
Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
“Typical” might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn’t buy it in the general case.
However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
That's a bit of a joke. Clarity is of course a primary virtue in all forms of academic writing, and one that is often ignored either unintentionally or in an attempt to impress one's reviewers and/or to signal one's membership in a particular tribe.
HackerNews tradition requires that I point out the considerable difference between software developer skills and knowledge of computer science.
Coding experience doesn't give you what a degree in computer science gives you, neither is a degree in computer science a substitute for experience as a developer.
Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects)
Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
This 100% - you said it better than I did.
It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity.
Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.
If writing well is to do it simply, concisely, and interestingly, then I don't think anyone tried to teach me any useful skills related to writing after eighth grade. I learned more reading "On Writing Well" in a bookstore waiting for my dad to buy a book in my 30s than I learned between 9th grade and the end of my B.S.
I don't remember anyone teaching any classes on how to learn. Would be incredibly surprised if the classics had changed that much since I went to school. There are skills that are useful to learning how to learn like how to use Anki, interweaving, visualization, chunking, etc.. but all of that information comes out of psychology research so I'd be surprised if it was taught in any of the classics.
Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.
I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not something I can do, at least in an academic environment.
That's said my life is much better for having attended college. However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four years is too much. So if you do two years at community college, that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is just tuition.
That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these for-profit institutions.
In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.
Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for
Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?
In ether case this isn't easily doable for people who come from unstable homes.
No language needed: Florida Institute of Technology, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Either 2 years in high school or 2 semesters in college, your choice: a STEM degree in a typical Florida state university
Some places require 4 years in high school.
Is it possible your community college was just unreasonably difficult?
Yes, infact I took French again at a different community college and passed.
The first community college I went too tried to cram 6 semester units into a single class. This still had the effect of derailing my life as I had to pick a different school to transfer to.
I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in supply.
I think a better alternative is having more schools have tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset in the real world.
Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing can pay reasonably well.
So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.
Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
this one hundred thousand times.
This is how it is today. The only difference is people are paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not actually learning valuable skills.
> Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like – unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of useless degrees, and increased tuition.
It really isn’t that complicated, especially for the single wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
What? Giving out easy loans doesn't make something cheaper, it makes something more expensive up to causing a bubble that will crash the rest of economy, like we did with housing in 2008.
I don't know what country you are talking about but at least in the US, we have community colleges which are very cheap and can "educate people in the skills necessary for being good citizens". It is only the worthless degrees from private / for-profit colleges which are a problem.
On the other hand, no-one who is admitted to (say) Harvard is going to be prevented from going by an inability to pay. These top schools are rich enough to fund need-based scholarships.
(source: wife is a professor at an Ivy League school)
https://admissions.yale.edu/affordability-details
We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally fail and be taken over by real market demand education.
High school grads, College Grads, Liberal Arts Grads, Non-STEM Grads, Non-Tech Grads, and now here we are.
They came for the average CS graduates and I did not speak out.
How far do we have to get up the stack to notice we have a problem? Harvard Medical Grads?
Your comment embodies the problem. If you expect CS students to have a wide array of specific work experience then you're siphoning experience and not creating any.
Companies should be much more concerned with teaching while building. Most of these students can do the work - they simply need an introduction to the specific special environment that company uses. But those companies refuse. Therefore they don't get workers. It's a self created problem.
It's also in line with basic market economics. Surplus of hiring candidates means you have more leverage.
Another proof is how often big name companies will do diversity hires that are not related to competancy. If there was such demand and competancy required then these would not happen.
Two things stuck out to me the most:
1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities).
The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead.
"Abandon every hope, who enter here."
https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...
We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long before we had PhDs.
Obsession with normalizing agency to abide fiscal concerns is the real issue here.
Let wealth collapse by refusing to buy into the idea we owe deference to those that hold wealth.
Teach the classics. Write open source.
None of it has to be done for a dollar, or outsized prestige.
I think I'd like some evidence for that.
Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and even Pre-Columbus America had complex cultural customs, art, math, engineering, medicine, language they handed down generationally.
University as we know it is a relic of Medieval European tradition.
The Greek schools of philosophy were taught by the equivalent of PhDs.
Concerning the nurture component; Change their parents? Take the children away to be raised by a government?
Concerning the nature component; Alter their DNA?
If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life that isn't directly related to your occupation?
I so completely disagree. College/university is for education. If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load of money.
As an example lawyers and doctors don’t gain skills in law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced internships for that.
CompSci graduates can’t tell the difference because the software industry isn’t mature. In all other professional career paths there is some combination of licenses or certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.
Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers, carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist, a college degree is required unless you want your resume to go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e. nepotism).
The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact that most can't get employment in the first place without a degree, and internships don't pay the bills.
In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
Get a graduate degree and then a professional license, such as CISSP. Software developers are just skilled technicians like carpenters and plumbers.
More what? Licenses? License != skills.
A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study per section.
Right, but what are the minimum requirements to become a software developer? A single 30 minute interview? There aren't any administrative or legal requirements. There is no minimum educational requirement.
You have this false impression that every software job has the same requirements. There are plenty of jobs where candidates have no hard requirements, but there is a large number that do have certification & degree requirements and/or rigorous interview processes.
Jobs building dating apps for dogs have substantially different requirements than one building brake control systems for cars, even if the job title for each is "software engineer."
I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick).
They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?
A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.
This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
Unless you recognize that human ability is not equally distributed. In which case colleges need to be exclusionary to maintain prestige. And that prestige is an important signal in a universe where success is dependent on competence.
Conversely, when prestige signals are eroded, there are gradual, self-reinforcing downstream effects, wherein all of our institutions - industry, media, government, academia - are gradually populated with cohorts of reduced competence, and society at large becomes less capable of recognizing merit, particularly given that when once clear signals like alma mater are no longer accurate, laypeople are more drawn to the nonsensical belief that all humans are equally capable.
And slowly the withering of these institutions, and recognition of/appreciation for competence, lead to a withering of society and, I think, this phenomenon is one of the drivers behind the ongoing collapse of the American Empire, for better or worse. The intent behind lowering standards for entry is amiable but based on a faulty and ultimately dangerous assumption.
Maybe it would be money well-spent for the public-sector to poach top academics from private intuitions.
It would lead to salary inflation, but might be the most cost effective way to sap prestige and inject into good public universities.
But that’s not even terribly relevant to the average student. An undergraduate won’t benefit from going down the same hallways as the world’s foremost expert on Nigerian guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having studied at the top university (in terms of research, not teaching) matters a lot.
The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.
2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome simply because there is no other way to justify spending a quarter million dollars on a degree. That is an order of magnitude more than it costs to deliver a high quality education[2].
If college were truly just about learning, you could start cranking out college-educated citizens for $20k a pop. At price it's an easy decision to make. Instead, colleges have become luxury resorts with a classroom as one of the amenities. They compete on things like best food, recreation and nightlife. It's not (necessarily) a problem to bundle education with fun, but you have to justify the expense to your customers. Colleges have chosen to highlight the differences in earnings between those with degrees and those without.
[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.
[2] The cost of the primary input has decreased: Faculty salaries have been stagnant for 40 years--for a given "level". But faculty salaries have actually decreased when you account for "title deflation". Colleges increasingly rely on "adjunct" faculty and delay the promotion from assistant to full professor. It is now common for PhDs to do two or even three post-docs (which can include teaching duties) before getting a first appointment. Thus, a 40 year-old academic today has a lower title and costs less to employ than a 30 year-old academic from the middle of the 20th century.
You could argue the world in 1950s was totally different, and today that education is necessary.
Alternatively you could take a view that the world was comparable enough to draw conclusions. But then, 1878 was 'equidistant' to 1950's, as 1950's is to today. That's the year US had witch trials. Lynching was still happening, and continued untill 1960's. Now I am willing to bet that folks here do not want to descend into barbarism, and that education has a huge role to play here.
I read somewhere, but unfortunately can't remember where. That disaffected highly educated people stir up a lot of political trouble - so these things might be related in a causal way (though I'm a little skeptical).
I also wonder how much university just has people exchange one cultural belief system for another based on who is around them rather than learning how to think critically and independently.
My personal experience leads me to think that most people will just start to believe what everyone around them believes, I worry how much I'm affected by this too.
Hitler had extreme disdain for academics. It's definitively a driving for polarization since it's so easy to draw the line. People who drop out/never enroll have a lot in common with each other and people who graduate have a lot in common with each other but once you compare college educated and high school educated people the overlap starts shrinking.
Also, the idea that a four year degree has a monopoly on making people educated is just incorrect.
If you think it's the best thing for a society to have a well educated citizenry, then I hope you're working to get the government to pay for free college for everyone. The idea that people should have to make enormous personal financial sacrifice for the greater good of society is just bad.
If it was currently possible to take a group of 18 year olds, and transform them into highly motivated, highly intelligent people, I assume it would exist for sale.
Unfortunately, the construction of a person seems to be highly complex, and is subject to genetics, home life and parental wealth, childhood experiences, peer and other influences, etc.
Until then, humans will continue to use shortcuts for assessing the probability of one's future ability to "succeed" (however one wants to define it), one of which is attaining admittance at certain institutions.
They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in turn attracts the brightest students.
I might suspect bad linear algebra teaching is caused by a lack of interest in linear algebra by the teacher.
Good researchers are not necessarily good teachers. Good teachers are not necessarily good researchers. But the best teachers in my experience are fiercely interested in their subjects, which they share with the best teachers.
Everybody likes sharing their interests, right?
In the end it doesn't make a difference. Employers want to hire good candidates. Hiring is hard and the outcomes asymmetric: very good candidates can give at most 10x performance and for a company with 100+ employees that barely registers, while very bad candidates can create absolutely stunning destruction. So hiring good candidates is a high stakes game. There's lots of noise, any way to get signal out of this noise is valuable. Employers pay big fees to recruiting agencies to get good hires. A reputable university, like Harvard or MIT is like an ideal recruiting agency (and no fees): not only it finds the best candidates for you, it also trains them for 4 years. The 4 years of training function as a further filter as well. In the end, someone graduating for such a college will be quite a sure bet for employers, and so they'll have much, much better prospects in the job market. So they are willing to pay for this. Are they born smart and Harvard does not teach them anything new? Who cares? They'll get much better job offers than if they graduate from Tulane, and that translates in more money in their pockets.
The point isn't about whether colleges are there for education or not, the point is that if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life you should get a return on that investment.
The idea that people should go enormously into debt to become educated for the sake of it is crazy. If you want to educate people for the sake of society, then get society to pay for their education. Until then, people need to make rational choices about what for many of them is the biggest financial commitment they'll make.
The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics.
It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all.
What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.
While I agree with you and approached my university education with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment, open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc.
Whether any of these practical or experiential goals are most optimally met, in terms of time/life/money/effort expanded, through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and heated discussion entirely :)
So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.
Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree.
I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.
Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities?
Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it?
[1] https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table4.pdf
Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.
More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.
In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.
> More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.
Yes, the bottom line matters because it's paying for your education. If there is no bottom line you will have no education. Consider this, back in the day only the richest people send their children to colleges and universities. How did they become rich? By maximizing profits. So yes, profits come first, after you have those profits you can spend it on nonessential education.
When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow, desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of decades of compounding inflation by subsidy.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-repo...
Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity.
And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks.
[1] Try to justify that without circular logic.
Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose that create other extremely important value in the world (the thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc) are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours, or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get scholarships?
I don't think it's a real trend. You only need to apply to one or two safety schools while you can apply to any number of good/reach schools. Those schools have made the admission process much more random. Used to be that your grades + SATs mostly determined who would accept you. Now it's whatever impressed some random admissions drone and who knows what they really want? So you shoot your shot with 40 reaches and hope one of them likes you. If you're a strong candidate you have to apply to more schools in case you get randomly rejected.
Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people.
I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large.
I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.
> The Common App’s data does not include community colleges because they typically allow anyone to enroll. But those schools, which often provide low-income students a first step into higher education, also saw steep declines. In the fall of 2020, freshmen enrollment fell by more than 20 percent.
The two trends in the article are a 17% increase in applications for the most selective institutions and a 20% drop for community colleges.
The Times uses weasel words here
>some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019.
Meaning only some selective institutions, the Berklely increase in applications was because they waived the standardized test.
Knowing application patterns this is bad news - it means that poorer people, especially undergrads have not applied this year.
It is unlikely that those same people just turned around and applied to Cornell. I argue that the increase in apps to elite institutions is from people who left the workforce from good jobs. They are making a strategic move to weather the COVID storm and come out on the other side better off.
I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".
Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.
Framing this as “rich” vs. “poor” is ridiculous. These “poor” institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper. There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I’m happy it’s finally happening.
Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College". But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
I think most people do realize it, which is why we're seeing what's being written about in the article. People realize if you merely want to be educated, you can do that for cheap or free anywhere, but nobody in HR screening resumes cares if you're educated. They care that you have name-brand pedigree. I remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super smart and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier State school and not from Stanford and that was the end of it. It's very classist and ugly. If I graduated today from the school I graduated from in the mid-90s, I wouldn't have a job either.
As we all know, this is not just happening in education: All of society is bifurcating into a few winners, and a lot of losers, and a shrinking number in the middle. Everything is has become a slug-fest where the many compete with each other in a high-stakes game for the few viable good opportunities, leaving the rest in ruin.
Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to the pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number of losers.
Wonder when this'll fall apart (if ever). I guess it's a good thing the majority of people worldwide are not exposed to this and therefore potentially get the benefit to observe and learn from it. Take care.
You forgot the key: Split the "losers" roughly 50-50 along some carefully crafted political/ideological lines, and have them fight each other rather than unite and fight the pimps.
If HR has anything to do with how engineers are selected there's something wrong with the company.
They are there to schedule interviews and take care of the paperwork.
It really sort of has to work that way. The volume and variance in quality is just overwhelming. There is no way someone technical could look at every resume.
In this case, the HR rep's opinion should have been ignored right away.
You'd be very mistaken if you think there aren't managers out there with the power to do their own hiring. It's not hard.
Most companies are lucky if they can even find someone ranging from competent to excellent for a given role. It's hard enough to do that. And if you land on an excellent candidate, most don't know how to retain them, because it's not economically feasible to do so. They leave, because they're consistently looking to maximize their earnings, or they're smart enough to start their own business.
Scott Galloway made a prediction last summer of what colleges and universities will thrive, survive, struggle, or face challenges given the current situation. Basically, the higher ed market will consolidate around more elite schools.
https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1180197139101696013
If he had to make bets on his predictions he’d be bankrupt.
1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend
2) it would be substantially more expensive
3) the acceptance rate would be much higher
ideally this would result in schools like UMass Amherst (which ironically is the best public university in Massachusetts - weird considering other states have better state flagships, but that's another issue) being able to compete far more effectively.
why would a smart poor kid ever go to UMass when you could go to Harvard for free? it has never made sense that you get better financial return from say, MIT, even though it costs the same as RandomPrivateU.
I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do, but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a lot harder to do if you have no money since you can't get a government loan to cover your expenses. UBI would be very helpful here.
You're right that it's harder for people who don't have the resources to buy computers and spend time learning/hacking. I've hired several really good devs who only had an HS degree but also had an OSS project, but a lot of people just won't have the resources to make that happen.
A Carnegie Mellon degree may help you get more interviews and therefore land your first job if you are struggling otherwise but its likely the person with the Kent State CS degree and the Illinois Urbana Champaign CE degree are not applying for the same jobs right out of school.
After the first few years education becomes less important and actual skills become far more important. Again this is more true at non FANG/SV/Start up type companies. Which is where most engineers will work for the majority of their career.
I'd be interested in doing an experiment to act like I'm in high school and want all the info on college applications and to see where I end up.
From there I picked: Rice, Rutgers, MIT, Worchester Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Virginia Polytechnic. Clearly, that was not just one state.
After picking, phone the schools. Ask them to send applications. More applications may arrive by surprise if you do well on the SAT or ACT.
When an application arrives, put it in a typewriter and carefully type into all the fields in the form. Send it by mail, physically, and wait to get mailed a response.
It's almost trivial to chart one's income possibilities based on where you graduate from and what degree you get. The knowledge about how to get into a tech job, or a high finance job, or get into medical school, or get hired by a top legal firm is available to everyone whereas it was limited before to those who knew people who knew these things.
We know what cities and suburbs of those cities will lead to maximal probabilities of "success", we know which schools have the highest achieving kids (or the ones with the richest parents), etc. It saves a lot of time to be able to filter real estate listings by greatschools.org metrics before.
I would argue that the people who succeed at that are pretty bright anyway, but are just applying their skill in an undesired way.
Now I can read about this stuff on reddit and learn the basics of how everything works.
A bright kid with an internet connection can leverage that even if they're in a social network or community that doesn't understand any of these things.
The remaining problem is unknown unknowns. If you don't know what exists, it can be hard to know what to ask. You can't search 'Best X' when you don't know what X is. If you're online though, you may be able to see someone mention it and go from there.
Honestly, it sounds like you should transfer to an institution that's a better fit for you.
In addition to low births, student immigration has been severely restricted in recent years by federal policy.
With both factors, the applicant pool is smaller.
The thinking is that conditions would be structured to better ensure the college degree provides suitable income (only for certain majors, only if the college provides certain data about grads, etc).
The entire post secondary education system in Germany is focused on specialization in a given field of study (at universities) or vocational training. The advantage here is that there is no financial penalty for choosing the wrong path, only missed opportunity cost due to time spent.
I completed my secondary school in Germany at a typical Gymnasium (the highest tier of the three major secondary school types). Note that my parents did not attend college and aren't wealthy. Around 8th grade my school curriculum exceeded their knowledge. I attended a private liberal arts college in the US as an international student where I relied on (private) scholarships and (private) loans [international students cannot get subsidized loans -- generally interest rates are high and interest accumulates even while enrolled in school].
The only reason why I chose to attend university was because I wanted to gain an advanced understanding of mathematics and I aspired to one day become a college professor (this has since changed of course).
Despite my school being very highly ranked and my hard work producing good academic results it simply did not have the brand reputation to unlock opportunities such as even being invited to phone screens. I had to take a roundabout way to get into my career and instead work my way up from less desirable positions. This focus on brand for academic institution is also something you do not generally find in Germany where the criteria is typically the binary question of whether or not you have a particular degree in a particular subject area (though again the vast majority of jobs do not require a degree).
Too often I observed the candidate with a Bachelor's at ~3.0 GPA from say Stanford being preferred over the candidate with a ~4.0 from a lesser known but equally rigorous institution.
Of course this focus on brand continued beyond college. I quickly learned that a less desirable / impactful role at a top company opens more doors than top positions at unknown companies.
Call me pessimistic, but I do not advise people to attend college in the US unless they can attend schools with a very strong brand and extensive alumni network in their desired professional field.
Looking back at my education my secondary education in Germany was more formative and critical than my college education in the US. While I did have the opportunity to take advanced coursework in college here in the US it did not prepare me for generic jobs not specific to my field of study (and barely even is an asset in my profession). I believe we need to improve high school education in this country and reverse the trend of requiring a college education for the majority of jobs.
If I were applying to universities today and had otherwise good credentials but difficulties performing on standardized tests like the SATs, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of remorse for trying to cheat in a rigged system.
I recognize that a lot has been written about the SAT/etc being biased, but high school grades and "experiences" are worse (how does one compare what a "B" in Calculus or club president actually means, in all high schools across the US??).
I may be biased as I did well on standardized tests. I have family members that volunteer to do admissions interviews as alumni of a very major name university. They both mention how gamified some applicants are taking the process, with some high school students' parents essentially buying them research opportunities and other experiences to talk about on their applications. While standardized testing is influenced by family wealth and resources, I'm convinced standardized tests (SAT/ACT/AP/etc) are the least influenced part of college admissions, and thus should remain in some form.
Landing a faculty job at any university - public or private - is an extraordinary achievement.
Pre-pandemic, going to college away from home offered a fun environment with many amenities. During the pandemic, these fun aspects are greatly limited (and parents might not let kids go anyway, due to health risks). When you take away so much of the fun stuff that goes along with college, it doesn't make as much sense to pay $50k/yr in tuition when the experience isn't that much different than your local state school (which costs $10k).
Top colleges, on the other hand, still offer differentiation in terms of degree prestige. Add onto that the promise of not taking standardized tests into account (as the article notes Cornell and other schools are doing this), and it's not surprising that applications are up.
And given the academic job market, basically any state university should be able to pick and choose among hundreds of highly qualified faculty candidates.