I attended one of these colleges -- it also has a private high school on campus with a similar model. In college I did things from HVAC, custodial, resident assistant, to web development to pay my tuition.
I am from Eastern Kentucky. My dad was the first in the family to go to college and attended Berea. I don't know what jobs he held all through school but he did a lot of wood working at one point and brought those skills home.
Several students in my high school also attended Alice Lloyd over the years. One of my closest acquaintances did custodial work and always spoke highly of it and seemed to enjoy being on campus and working there.
I think both of these schools (and I am sure the others) perform a much needed service and I would love to see more schools offer something like this. I was a work-study student in college but of course $8 / hr didn't cover much. It would have been nice to have some sort of merit / effort based compensation above the cash pay to help offset tuition costs.
Is it atypical for a Christian college to be attended by Christians? I toured their campus years ago with a friend that was looking at attending the school. I'm not sure why you would go there if you weren't a Christian.
I can't comment on what's "typical", but I have known people who went to a Christian college while being atheist themselves, purely on the basis of it having a good program for the degree they wanted.
Oh sure, I'd expect that most people going there align with the college's beliefs. I'm just pointing out that it's not 100% and that there are non-Christians going to Christian colleges.
Agreed, but the comment I was responding to seemed to be surprised, concerned, or at least saw it as a negative that a Christian college was populated by Christians.
The vast majority of Christian Church-affiliated colleges in the USA are either catholic (Jesuit in particular) or Mainline. In both of those cases, the denominational ties do not preclude attendance at the college/university by non-Christians, LGBT, etc. Either in policy or in practice. If a university is Catholic or Mainline, it's pretty safe to assume that the college is open to all and that a huge % of students attending the school are not from that denomination (or particularly theistic).
Places like Wheaton (Chicago), Cedarville, Liberty, CofO, etc. are very much the outliers in terms of how church-affiliated higher ed institutions behave toward non-fundamentalist-conservative-Christians.
BTW, being Christian is not enough at CofO. The important thing is to be socially conservative and fit in with the fundy crowd. Mainline lutherans, for example, definitely aren't welcome. The national-ethnic-religious-political belief complex that is de facto required to get by at CofO is probably not even recognizable as Christianity to a European Christian eye.
Anyways, with respect to CofO, the bigotry is really not even relevant. Compare the CS faculty at Truman/Rolla/etc. vs CofO. The work study program is a $20/hr job for 15 hours a week. You can get up to $15/hr easy and your improved internship placements out of Truman/Rolla will put you ahead of CofO even before graduation. Ten years down the road there's probably close to an entire 0 in outcome differences.
Another is Deep Springs College, about 30 miles from Big Pine, CA.
This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman.
The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engineering positions in the highly-rural western and mountain states.
Most students transfer to a 4 year institution to complete their degrees.
Generally yes, I think the most common destinations are Chicago, Harvard, Cornell, and Michigan (Cornell and Michigan have Telluride houses which are run by the same organization as the college itself).
I was also going to mention Deep Springs. It's a very interesting school. Faculty do not have tenure and the college is largely run by the students who decide on faculty hiring, curriculum, and admissions. David Hitz, co-founder of NetApp is an alumnus. Students who graduate have been very highly successful in transferring to top schools.
I saw this in tv. It reminded me City Slickers. It looked fun. When I was burning out in a professional school; I would have jumped at the opportunity to do this program.
(I'm not denigrating it. I've been a landscaper, dishwasher in highschool who was yelled at in Chinese nightly for not doing jobs other than dishwashing--like washing/polishing his car between rushes, General contractor, auto mechanic, and electrician. I know about manual labor, and I never liked it after my 40's. This program looked fun though.)
One of my friends from grad school went there. I was very tempted when I got the recruitment brochure as a high school senior (because I lived in Chicago, but wanted to go to California, I had to check the anywhere in the country box on the SAT/ACT results and ended up hearing from about half the colleges in the country—I was a big nerd and crossed them off the list in the back of the SAT booklet).
I met a couple Deep Springs transfers at the University of Chicago and they were some of the smartest, chillest, most well-rounded kids. Very impressive and it made me wish I had studied somewhere like that.
@dredmorbius's summary is good. Couple additions/nuances:
L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs to train public servants/leaders. He hoped they would play a larger role in society. (Some do, some don't...). To all incoming students, the school distributes a pamphlet written by Nunn called "The Voice of the Desert", in which he articulates his vision for the school and his appreciation for the mysteries of the wilderness.
Nunn founded at least three schools in his lifetime. The first was intended to train young men to become technical staff at his power plants. (Nunn supplied Tesla with power for some of his early experiments in Telluride, CO.)
The second school was founded back east. Its student body walked out en masse to volunteer for WWI.
The third school, Deep Springs, was founded in 1917, in a location isolated enough to preserve its student body in the face of social pressures. (Worked!)
At least nominally, the student body hires and fires the faculty, determines each semester's curriculum, and conducts the admissions process to replace itself. The extent to which it does that independently varies from one school administration to another. (When I was there, we had T-shirts that said "[[frontside]] In 1917, two radical social utopias were born... [[backside]] "Only one survived.")
It's a feeder school for larger, more prestigious institutions you've heard of.
It's also a really f*cking hard place to live, work and study, because of the sheer immensity of your responsibilities, and the intensity of social interactions.
Labor: I served as the farmer's assistant, the dishwasher, and the dairy boy when I was there. The dairy boy, the feedman and the cowboy are all responsible for the care, feeding and continued survival of livestock; the butcher is responsible for their merciful killing. The farmer's assistant has to grow the alfalfa to feed the cattle (or sell). Labor's no joke, and you can't screw it up without other people suffering. Life at DS is heavily interdependent, and the consequences of mistakes are real. (I've been told this may not be true at most liberal arts colleges...)
Social: If you don't like someone at DS, chances are you will still see them 4-5 times per day, including every meal, for two years. The school has an isolation policy. It is the only human community in a high-mountain desert valley. The near towns (Big Pine and Bishop, CA) are about a 30-40min drive away, IIRC. The students stay in the Valley for the length of each term. The only ones who leave are: 1) "the driver," who picks up groceries and applicants during application season; and 2) folks with a medical appointment. That's it. It also has a "no drugs or alcohol" policy during term, the enforcement of which is variable.
You might say it's free for a reason; you pay in other ways. I made several lifelong friends there, but I'm not sure I would counsel my younger self to do it again.
U. of Waterloo has an innovative model of alternating 4-month coops and then 4 months of school. By the time students graduate they've made some money and have a good amount of work experience. I really this was a model accessible to more people.
Half of the universities in Germany offer something like that, known as Duales Studium. It works quite well, though I personally haven’t taken part in it.
Northeastern is the big school for this in the US, the traditional model is two years of classes followed by alternating semesters of work and class until graduation for either 2-3 more years. In some cases you can come out with 2 years of experience before graduation
Unrelated, but this is how things worked in the Indian-'Dharmic'-schools across Asia.
Even today, if you go to a Ashram/Japanese Zen temple, you're expected to go and clean stuff.
The surrendering of the ego is itself quite therapeutic, if you come from a Western culture where the ego is so massively magnified/glorified.
Sadly, Indian culture is itself being choked off by vestigial-British Govt. in India, so won't be long before someone writes the equivalent of the "Darkening Age" for Asia.
This is what I get when I try to visit the website:
> Our European visitors are important to us.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Besides the irony of "being important" and GDPR [0] not having been solved for a simple website, this is the first time in a long while that I see something like this, and it made me think (again!) how weird, unfair, and strange the world is, in relation to laws and regulation.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Should instead read:
> This site has been unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area for years, because it makes more economic sense to us to sinkhole Europe rather than bother to comply with GDPR.
Things suddenly start making sense when you look at them from this point of view.
Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best.
The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.
The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.
Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.
Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
You're just confused over who's paying for it. Someone is, I can guarantee you that. And it's not student labor.
I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
Not only that, but the OP mentioned tuition specifically. Tuition is the fee you may have to pay to attend college. If there is no such fee to pay, whether the money comes from donations, taxes, a trust fund, a lottery, intellectual property royalties or what have you, there is indeed no tuition.
> Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society.
Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.
> students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work
You already believe that, you just disagree on the definition on student. Or should we take 14 year olds out of school and send them back into the coal mines?
If I put out a sign that says "free chocolate", it would be silly to respond by saying that somebody must have paid in time and/or money to produce the chocolate. Because that's entirely obvious, and not the point. When somebody points out that "free tuition" or "free healthcare" have monetary inputs, that's a pointless response to a strawman misinterpretation. Saying that we should have "free tuition" isn't at all a statement that education should somehow magically be done without any effort on the part of society. It's a statement that the costs of education shouldn't be shouldered by those receiving the education.
This is even referred to in loquation's post, by describing it as an ideological problem. I agree, and would pose the ideological question as follows: Should education be treated as an individual investment or a societal investment? If it is an individual investment, then it should be paid for by the student either up front or through debt, and that investment is recouped directly through higher income. If it is a societal investment, then it should be paid for by society as a whole (i.e. publicly funded through taxes), and that investment is recouped indirectly through opportunities that require a more educated society.
While you can go into a huge amount of debt in the US getting a college degree, you can also graduate with little to no debt just using the many programs and scholarship available and being strategic on where you go to college. Yes there are always going to be people paying $80k per year to go somewhere, but you'll also have a lot of people getting there degree while spending very little or (if they are good academically) nothing.
That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/week, plus 20-30 over the summer from every student is a lot of manpower. Albeit very ill trained/inexperienced manpower.
That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.
As you hint at, I think you would quickly find that the university would look like it's run by a bunch of slumlords, with things falling apart, and no one responding when the toilet gets clogged or the wifi goes down.
Why is it that people think it's okay to give 18 year old a machinegun and a granade and to send them to kill, or trust them with a 40 ton vehicle, but they can't be trusted at basic everyday life?
Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right
I don’t think many people who run universities are the same who think it’s okay to send kids into war. The people making the laws and starting the wars which necessitate giving 18 year olds machine guns are not actually interacting with or involved in the lives and development of those same 18 year olds.
Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally?
I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.
They don't trust 18-year-olds to tell the people with guns who to shoot at, or where to drive the trucks, though.
Anyone who has operated in a student-run organization will tell you that when you're doing anything complicated (like managing a college IT department), the ~4-year limit on institutional memory is a serious issue, especially when it involves people who mostly don't have the experience to be proactive about documentation (and, I should note, institutional documentation is not an easy problem for organizations filled with seasoned professionals).
You're confusing the issue. Soldiers, even 18 year old ones, are doing that as their profession full time and trained to do so. (aside from the overall question on whether it's good to be having kids trained to kill).
Students are students. Their job is to be students, not administrators or full time workers. That's why things run and maintained by students typically don't have the follow through and professionalism of people who are paid to do it.
I think for that to work you'd either need some sort of "perpetual students" who hang around a long time, or a reasonable percentage of people enrolling later in life than is typical (and possibly even enrolling as a student after earning a degree elsewhere).
Have you ever managed an intern? Inexperienced labor often has negative value-add.
> Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors
A second semester senior without a job lined up negotiating a seven figure contract... what could go wrong?
> IT students handle the networking
This is already a thing at most colleges.
> mechanical engineers the boilers
Might be possible, but could also be a disaster.
> hospitality management majors dorm maintenance
Students already do work in dorms at front desks and so on. Business majors aren't qualified to do plumbing, electrical, etc.
Students who are qualified to do plumbing and electrical are probably better off selling that labor on the open market.
At the end of the day, the other basic problem is that at most colleges, most college students who need work can get better-paying work than the sort of work that's available on campus. Why work in Uni IT over the summer if you can get an internship literally anywhere else that probably pays better and could become a full time job?
This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. The basic is that students are employed by a company and work there half the time. In return the company pays for the studies in the other half.
I did my Bachelor this way. I’d say you learn much more compared to University. And a great way to gain some real work experience. I did a proper University Master afterwards but the experience from the dual system helped me a great deal with my first job in the industry.
That's not 'only used in German-speaking countries', unless you insist on the (translated) naming.
It's called 'an apprenticeship' in the UK for example, and similarly elsewhere I assume.
Some universities offer them for professional degrees now too - I had a colleague at Arm who was part-time and a student on such a programme. (Two days a week year round apart from a break for exams iirc - quite distinct from the (more common) summer internship format.)
That‘s not how this works in German speaking countries in Europe.
The school is paid for by the tax payer and the company pays the apprentice a salary that should represent the value they create as an apprentice.
The company also pays for additional courses organized by their guilds. For programmers and system administrators this might be how to build a pc or a network or how to build some software project.
It‘s a great system for companies and apprentices. I think there are even some Swiss companies that try to build similar programs in the US because they have a hard time hiring in the US.
This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if you got one of the better jobs). It might be enough to cover rent and food, but not much else.
While we're on the topic, can someone really explain to me what endowments are for? There's many universities that claim hardship but have multi-billion dollar endowments. I mean Harvard (the largest endowment) has over $2m per student. The "business" is clearly profitable without ever accepting a dime from students. I'm just unsure what this money is actually doing.
I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight against inflation and support new initiatives.
> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments.
I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is to be like dividend investors, it does not appear (at least from what I'm seeing) that they are actually acting like someone with a goal to live off of dividends. There's more growth than that. Or there's something missing that I don't understand (more likely).
Using Harvard as an example, they had an operating expenses of $5.0 billion in 2021 [1]. In order to cover that, they would need to be having a consistent rate of return around 9% on their ($54 billion) endowment. That a fairly good estimate of the rate of return for the stock market over the past 25 years, so not unreasonable. Though, this ignores that most of the endowment consists of restricted funds that can only be used on certain ways. Also, generally you need to cut a few percentage points if you want to guard against inflation.
So yes, Harvard could cover just about all of their budget with the endowment returns, though they probably need some extra income to cover the holes formed by the restricted funds and avoid inflation pressure.
Is their current usage of the returns too conservative? Probably. Do they have an absurdly large pile of cash that they have no business holding on to? Not really; the investment returns roughly correspond with their current operating costs.
I was taught that you should estimate a 4% rate of return, which means Harvard's endowment can cover around 40% of their budget. Much of the remainder will come through research grants, and a rather small percentage will be tuition and fees.
Yes, that's what I learned as well. And that's actually close to what Harvard reported using last year ($2.1 billion from the endowment; 40% of the budget).
I was only using the more aggressive number as a thought experiment to the original poster about what it would take the cover the entire operating budget.
I admit I don't know about university endowments, so the question is: what are those $40+ billion dollars sitting there for every year? Does a university really need a balance that may be larger than some nation's GDP?
Thanks for the answer, makes sense from a purely economical perspective, but I wonder if universities should fund themselves through speculation and financial instruments. Sounds way too detached from the actual purpose of the institution.
Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same? Why not theaters next? In the end, if keeping the balance in check is the main thing an istitution is bound to do, why not stop doing education (= expenses) and just focus on investments?
> Sounds way too detached from the actual purpose of the institution.
I literally don't understand what you mean. The purpose of the institution is to educate people (and other stuff.) They do that by investing money that they were given for this exact purpose.
What on earth could the problem with that be?
No only are they providing education to people, often for free, they're also lending people money to build and develop businesses along the way.
I think you've got some idea they have their billions in a Duck McScrooge style vault? They don't - being invested means they lend it to people to build things. It's all being actively used.
> Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same?
Many hospitals and health organisations have endowments. For example the Wellcome Trust has an endowment of $37 billion. I think they funded my wife's PhD in cancer.
> Why not theaters next?
Many art institutions have endowments. For example the Getty uses a $7 billion endowment to fund the arts so they're preserved for and accessible to people like you.
What is the issue you see here? If they kept it as cash in the bank it'd depreciate rapidly and they'd end up with none left.
It's just a very foreign concept to me as a european. Perhaps I'm more inclined to the idea that institutions like education and healthcare should be publicly funded and shouldn't aim to be economically sound, as some services can only be done properly at loss.
In 1992 in Italy hospitals became "hospital companies", meaning what was once a public service with the sole aim of providing the best possible treatments to citizens for no cost, became at all effects a business (although still state owned) with incomes, expenses and a budget. You may think this makes sense, but since then our healthcare quality has tanked.
One notable side effect is that all hospital companies cut on the intensive treatment beds to save on costs, which backfired heavily during covid since we didn't have enough beds and many patients died without proper treatment as a consequence.
I mean, the roman empire, ancient greece and in modern times Britain. Britain is European as much as USA is. Not really common in contemporary Europe.
The article itself notes that it's common practice only in North america, and when it is used outside of USA it's in a different way:
>In the United States, the endowment is often integral to the financial health of educational institutions. Alumni or friends of institutions sometimes contribute capital to the endowment. The use of endowment funding is strong in the United States and Canada but less commonly found outside of North America, with the exceptions of Cambridge and Oxford universities
> Government-provided healthcare also has an income, expenses, and a budget. They don't just spent whatever they want with no planning and no income.
Of course, but there is a big difference in having a regular accountability and starting to think in terms of business. Suddenly intensive treatment beds become "centers of cost", not vital but expensive tools required to save lives.
>Does a university really need a balance that may be larger than some nation's GDP?
This comparison makes no sense.
1. GDP is a per-year measure, but an endowment is accumulated over multiple years. Therefore durectly comparing them doesn't really make much sense.
2. "some nation" includes some pretty small/poor countries. Should it be a surprise that an organization in the US is bigger than a country like Liechtenstein?
You are probably under-estimating the size of Harvard. That isn't to say that large organizations tend to be ... well large organizations, but Harvard is huge.
The specifics of administrative staff at a place like Harvard are doubtless different from your typical comparable company (What does a Dean of $X do???) but probably pretty similar in principle. Maybe less directly influenced by market pressures but you just can't operate a large organization in the same way you organize a small one.
You are probably over-estimating the size of Harvard. It’s not that huge for an R1 institution. Obviously, they have to pay huge money for cutting edge equipment and high salaries for top talent. But I don’t think that Harvard is protected from any administrative bloat so endemic in higher education. And since Harvard commands so much money the problem can theoretically be much worse than with state universities and LACs.
> I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends?
Tenure means a guaranteed job for life, and the university needs the money to guarantee it. The position exists even if there aren’t sufficient student or research grants to fund it.
Harvard is a bad example to use here because they are so massive. Other schools aren’t situated as well. And yea the endowments have taken a life of their own but tenure is a part of why they exist.
There has been an almost unprecedented ten year period of growth in the equity markets. And the big endowment which I keep my eye on at least has done significantly better than the market. It's prudent not to count on that continuing--not that the school could turn on a dime with respect to their revenue mix anyway.
Harvard, or other universities, are not too different from other corporations. Why would they offer to pay for something that their customers themselves would pay for? After all, a Harvard degree is quite valuable, and who's reaping the benefit of it?
They want to make as much money off their endowments (savings) as they can, and spend as little of it as possible on things that they don't need to pay for. Note that while the endowment is huge, actually a large part of it is restricted in what it can be used for, by "generous" donors who put conditions on their money, funnily enough. Turns out that they don't want the money spent on just sending kids to school, they rather want to see their name on art in museums, on professorships, and on department buildings.
Last year, Harvard's operating costs were $5B (roughly). To pay for that (roughly):
-- $1B came from student tuition
-- $1B came from funded research grants
-- $2B was released from the endowment
-- $1B in gifts, royalties, licenses, other income
In a sense, $2B spent from such an endowment is not too different from what you would plan for your own retirement. Admittedly, Harvard Management Company (investment arm) earns much better than average though.
It's a choice by these universities, how big they want to be, the ambition of their educational goals, and to some extent, yes their power and influence. They are no different than many corporations.
If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Maybe Harvard isn't the best example since it is private. But to me this seems a bit different when we're talking about public universities. It seems odd to run an academic facility like a company trying to turn a large profit. It is weird to me to compare them to corporate organizations, just like it is weird to compare government to corporations. I know it happens and there are some similarities, but just because apples and oranges are both spherical fruits doesn't mean we're comparing equal things.
Well, I think you've pointed out and answered part of your question.
Public universities generally have little/much smaller endowments by comparison because they rely on government for their steady stream of revenue. And because of that they can, and have pressure to, fulfill policy-based goals of educating students at little to no cost, or heavily subsidizing it.
Some public universities are acting according to the incentives they've been given, and accumulating their own endowments to insulate against political unreliability, and you can also see why college sports are such an important revenue stream for them as a result.
Altruistic behavior in a non-profit? The horrors. If they want to be a corporation fine, then pay taxes like one. Otherwise they should find ways to price education at cost, not at market clearing prices. I am sure they can, just hit up donors some more and trim the administrative largess.
Harvard is significantly different than most corporations because Harvard doesn’t pay taxes.
Yet Harvard is not a typical not for profit either, as you won’t find many non-profits with a $53B treasure chest.
> If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Yes, the majority want a different system, your average person doesn’t really like the fact institutions like Harvard/Yale have a combined ~$100B tax free war chest and supply 8 of the 9 lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.
They absolute most elite colleges lose money on the kids but...like it's a human resources thing, the administration transitions into senior jobs at other, less flash but equally expensive universities for a remarkable salary for how little work it is, and a crazy amount of power over the most politically active, and legally vulnerable because now they're responsible for debts, tried as adults of course, their parents are technically absolved of any responsibility to help them (except when there's a contract to pay for college, which is rare) so paying is totally optional, and poorest age bracket. And they're legal to have sex with, and at their peak of appearance in most respects, and they can't get a decent job without that degree if they're in a bind to get a lawyer. Especially in a bear market like right now, or 2008, youngest adults are fucked the most. I once asked about legal representation against a groundless and provably false rape accusation where the court would say this is a total lie, the scenario was proof sufficient to absolve someone from a murder, meaning court-valid proof all the way. The guy quoted me $25,000, will financial aid help with that I wonder? And he said there's like a delay (when they kind of sniff out if you've got legal firepower if you're rich you obviously do or politically connected), but then once it gets going it's like, it gets going strong and disgusting.
I actually entirely disagree with the premise that students should work. I think it's wrong, aside from a perhaps holiday job. They should study, that's it. If they are not busy enough to study, then they don't study hard enough.
That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
True, being a student should be considered a full-time job. I'm from Europe and we get stipends that depend on grades (and financial situation), and studying is at least somewhat considered a duty and responsibility towards society then, instead of the American attitude where students are service consumers, customers who must be pandered to. You can see where that attitude has led on American campuses.
I think it could possibly work in a financially neutral way if the school contracted the students (as either skilled or unskilled labor) out to local businesses. There'd be a lot of ethical considerations around how to establish a relationship between the students, the school, and the businesses where everyone is getting a good deal and the students are protected from being exploited (however one defines the term).
I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him.
I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)
Yeah, it doesnt make sense to make school more like work. Homework is already despised, how can schooljobs be anything more than that? What about making work more like school? Making corporations more like college? Some may prefer that.
There used to be a system like this that doesn't get mentioned much, I think it was called things like 'apprenticeship,' 'cadetship,' 'technical school' and such.
If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.
> And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind.
Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job.
Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.
My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.
One can argue plusses and minuses, but my time at law school was very productive and, despite my winding down my practice for something new, benefits me to this day. Law school is what you make of it.
This is basically how I see most cases. I did work a part-time job for a few semesters, but it was really easy and I never felt I was sacrificing my education. I dropped it after holding it for a few of my early semesters to free up time to maintain a happy study/free-time balance.
It's certainly true that students can't produce enough value by cooking food and sorting mail to pay for the cost of a modern US college tuition, but there are some specific areas where I do think students can perform high-value "jobs", and which are currently underutilized.
- Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard.
- Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.
Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.
> but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes
1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.
2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.
3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.
There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.
Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.
Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.
> undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster
My university (Olin College) was undergraduate-only, but your general point about good teaching being a rare skill is definitely valid. Our student body was definitely pretty high caliber both technically and in terms of explaining-things skills.
> it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state
This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction in those courses could be pretty easily replaced with videos. It's not ideal, but seems to work OK.
> For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops.
This is certainly true if you just hire some students and tell them to do their best, but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process. For example, it's reasonable to provide instruction for the instructors on how to be effective, and invest more in quality video or written content to explain technical details that a student might not be able to articulate well. In my experience, being taught by student instructors definitely also helps prepare students to teach as student instructors, in a virtuous cycle.
Many of the tools for doing this well don't exist in a cohesive form today, but to the extent that people are working to make education cheaper, this seems like a promising direction to investigate.
> This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction
Berkeley is not a good counter-example.
There are usually several teaching professors doing a full time job behind the scenes -- handling a myriad of student crises, handling a huge quantity of special accommodations, plagiarism and other academic misconduct, behavior issues (on the part of both students and staff!!!), constant question bank maintenance, constant schedule tweaking, interfacing with faculty demands from down-stream courses, and so on. Those are all trivial, though. Most important -- by far -- is training and managing a large course staff most of whom have never taught a recitation or graded a homework assignment!
Scaling up from a class of 1 instructor and 40 students (at Olin 20 or 15 I'd guess?) in one class to class with 40 staff members and 1000+ students and several lecturers is its own skillset. Those instructors are not teachers. They are mid-level managers. It's a different job, and not one that most undergraduates are prepared to take on.
And the face that it's a machine matters. Teaching a few recitations or lab sections and grading homework is not even remotely the same as instructing a course.
It's a bit like saying that you don't need experienced management at a logistics company because, after all, everyone learns how to do the warehouse job within a week. True, but keeping that machine running requires institutional memory and is itself a full time job. And just because you can train cogs quickly doesn't mean many of those cogs would do a particularly good job at designing and operating the underlying machine. Or even a miniature version of that machine.
> but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process.
Having spent time both inside and outside the elite academic institutions, folks who use places like Olin or Berkeley as barometers for "normal" are wildly out of touch with 90+% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA.
Students at places like Olin or Berkeley are already the cream of the cream of the crop. At Olin or Berkeley you have a handful of good student-educators every year. At normal places the acceptance rate is closer to Olin's reject rate, and the applicant pool is way lower quality. At normal places an above average Olin kid comes around once a decade or less, and the annual cream of the crop at Olin or Berkeley simply never pass through.
> Both the College of the Ozarks and Berea College rely on a stream of non-tuition funding to pull off the work college model. This includes a mixture of private donations, Pell Grants and sustaining funding from hefty endowments.
> [...] Berea’s $1.6 billion endowment covers around three-quarters of the college’s operating expenses for its approximately 1,600 students. College of the Ozarks has an endowment just shy of half a billion dollars; its endowment-per-student ratio is one of the highest in the country.
> Relying on this type of funding does limit the number of students that can be enrolled each year and can make the schools particularly vulnerable to changes in the economy.
So the students don't really need to work as part of the model. It's more of a "Large endowment and private donations enables colleges to not charge tuition".
But I do think that work experience is important for college students. Even if your work experience isn't directly related to your field of study, just having stood behind a cash register, gives you a lot of maturity when facing the job market after graduation.
A college where everybody eats free dinner and lunch (We pay 1/10 of the actual cost of the food), pays no tuition, can take student loans with really low interest rates (the amount they loan is not much and it's not same as student loan in Western countries where you take loans to pay for tuition fees rather here students take loan to buy stuff they need like laptops and such.) is supposed to result in prolific people who are going to help the country so the government takes care of them. However a lot of these student immigrate to other countries to study for masters and PHD and never come back and stay there for life while they were supposed to be going there only to study! Seems like the government is providing people so they can immigrate. How bad this government can be?!!
BTW I'm Iranian and since I feel like everyone here is American I thought maybe sharing a little different point of view could be beneficial. I myself think of immigrating to another country a lot and honestly seems like everything here designed in a way to make us immigrate. From mandatory military service to economic problems and being disconnected from the world (more in a economical sense again where we can't have international transactions, but here I am connected to you informationally(I think I just invented a new word)!)
I respectfully disagree, as a person who probably grew less than 100 miles from you.
While it is not the worst place in the world to grow up by economic standards, and may as a matter of fact be not a bad place at all, the "free college" comes with the cost of literally no job guarantee after you graduate. Most importantly, even leaving the country isn't a garden of roses, on account of the fact that most countries see the passport and deport you on account of your country of origin being a state sponsor of terrorism.
There certainly are countries that seemingly offer a lot, but before you sell Iran being a country of free academic opportunities, think twice about the fact that there is freedom of speech outside of it.
While respecting your opinion (despite the fact that you would not have the same freedom of speech without anonymity in Iran), I think it's naive to think that just providing you with free pseudo-education with no chance of real success or quality of life is what this thread is about.
It's not pseudo-education if you are in the top universities. True still even after graduating from top universities you are not granted to find a job but as I said It's not a country of free academic opportunities but this opportunities are a way to get out of the country itself. I'm not selling it rather implying that a lot of people here (including myself) don't give a damn about academics and just study to get out of here. Also there isn't any free academic opportunities here. People who get accepted to these top universities usually tend to spend a lot of money and effort studying in high school so they can have a great performance on the entrance exam. It's not like anyone who decides can get a free degree.
Another point is that I currently don't have any anonymity. There is only one "mahdi7d1" on the internet as far as I know. And my username everywhere is the same. All my friends and anyone who knows me knows of my username and remembers it (Their curiosity of what 7d1 stand for makes them remember it!) So even a normal person might be able to trace down my activities on the internet and find my real Identity.
Also I haven't said anything to be afraid of lack of freedom of speech here. Moreover there is much more freedom of speech here than people both inside and outside realize and I would like to try to see how much there is!
You're touching on a different problem, though one that emerges in international contexts. It's also evident at national levels where higher education is subsidised regionally, but employment is flexible at a national scale.
Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more affluent regions.
This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.)
This turns up in India (particularly in technology), the Philippines (medicine), Eastern Europe / former Warsaw bloc (science, mathematics, computer programming), and in the US. For the latter, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has long had an excellent computer science programme. Its graduates are educated at the cost of Illinois taxpayers (both individuals and businesses), but tend overwhelmingly to leave the state. There's effectively no tech cluster near UIUC, and very little of one in Chicago itself. Tech employment in the state is ~320k vs. 1.4 million in California. And that's actually reasonably good --- 7th ranked in the US, ahead of Massachusetts, which at least has a tech tradition.
It's a bit hard to read by total employment and compensation, but my sense is that positions are less technically interesting within Illinois as well.
By position, top-10: CA, TX, NY, FL, VA, WA, IL, MA, PA, GA.
Bottom ten (starting at the bottom): WY, AK, ND, SD, MT, VT, HI, WV, DE, ME.
Top ten metros by tech employment: NYC, DC, LA, SJ, SF, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta.
> This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.)
You touch an excellent point that I never factored in when looking at why western government organizations demand free education in poor developing countries through policy or loan measures.
People who are taking highly specialised degrees and training for free cannot work locally because there is no market.
You earn on reputation, interest, and skilled labour through these measures.
I'd never quite reached the point of thinking it was a deliberate action, but now that you mention it.
And add to this liberal skilled-worker visa entry programmes with work-to-stay requirements.
Rich nations to poor: you raise 'em, train 'em, and pension 'em. We'll work 'em, pressure down their wages and bargaining power through work-to-stay reqs, and capture all the surplus labour value.
> I'd never quite reached the point of thinking it was a deliberate action
I always thought these aid and loan programs through organizations like IMF, WP, and countries require return on their investment beyond interest on principal.
This is why they include clauses related to education, democratic participation, financial and taxation reforms, etc as a condition of receiving the aid.
You can be less cynical and think they are advocating for reforms which make these countries grow and pay back the loan otherwise they might default.
You can be more cynical and think many of these policies are detached from what is needed on ground looking at impact.
For example, opening a particular industry or providing consumable aid often distort local markets and might impact local businesses and exports through currency manipulation.
Maybe you believe onerous regulation and compliance of first world without the enforcement budget and low corruption make these places less attractive for businesses. Introducing those as condition of receiving aid might be net negative in the long run.
It all depends on how you view with your lens.
Although countries who are receiving aid like this have no choice in the matter. They are desperate for cash. Power imbalance exist and can be abused.
One thing that strikes me from this article is a vast bureaucracy, regulation, credentialing structures, accounting, etc. that the story revolves around.
In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and teachers.
While these are not universities per se, the opportunities they open up to students are top notch. You don't need an entire college education to "set graduates on a path towards breaking the cycle of poverty", which according to the article is what work colleges aspire to achieve.
This vocational education is also much more economically efficient than universities in the same country, mainly due to losing the weight of bureaucracy and credentialing structures. Teachers are well-paid, ops run smoothly with few personnel, and students get access to many new job opportunities completely free of charge.
When I went to university (in Sweden), a lot of people were just pottering around, taking additional courses to delay having to get a real job, so I suppose that should be factored in when comparing efficiency between different systems as well.
I live in slovenia (also taxpayer paid colleges), and the situation here is the same.
First issue is, that basically everyone wants to study and actually goes to study, even if it's underwater basket weaving, and they already know that there are zero job prospects even at the time they are filling out the forms to go to college (~middle of the fourth year of high school).
The second is, that college gives you some benefits (almost free college dorms, food coupons, due to student-status, you can work student-type of jobs with some tax benefits, etc.), even people who wouldn't otherwise study, enroll just to get the "status", and people who want to study eg. english literature, but are not accepted for that programme, enroll to eg. electrical engineering, that they have no interest in, but it's easier to get in, and they still get the "student status".
The third is, similar to the second, even when they should finish their college (hopefully graduate,... or quit), they try to prolong the studying process, to keep the "student status" longer.
And the fourth, when they actually finish college, especially the ones with "useless degrees" (the ones, that there are no market needs for) have issues getting a job, since a lot of employers for "shitty jobs" (baristas, etc.) prefer hiring people with student status, due to much simpler hiring and firing process, much simpler bureaucracy and a bit better taxes.
So yeah... we (the taxpayers) pay a lot of money for a lot of students who either intentionally study stuff that we don't actually need (and the added value of that education in the later job (eg. barista with a masters in ancient greek) is basically zero), and for students who just abuse the student status for all the benefits and student work, making job-seeking harder for graduates.
There is also an additional problem of people studying something that the job market needs (medicine, engineering, CS,...), and then leaving the country the moment they graduate and never paying back their studies (because they never pay taxes in our country).
There are many alternative systems, that I'm not 100% they'd work better, by eg. colleges charging some tuition, and then graduates having to stay in the country and work in the field that they studied for X years (so their degree gives them some added value in their paychecks and then taxes that would bay their tuition back passively), or paying back their tuition directly if they want to leave or do some other, unrelated work.
There are universities (i.e. colleges) in Greece/EU, where not only the tuition is zero but you also get a good salary as you work towards your degree.
>Our European visitors are important to us.
This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
I guess they are admitting that they don't care about their non-eu visitors, and will not protect any user data unless forced to under the threat of legal trouble.
A number of people have commented on how this model of work-study is unrealistic because it relies on endowments for it to work.
I think the argument can be flipped. The problem is that of incentives and the wrong culture dont allow the debt-free, work-study program to be more widespread, by leveraging endowments.
Take for example a place like harvard.
Consider that the objective of a harvard portfolio manager is to grow its prestige and carry incentive payout, by increasing its AUM and reinvesting returns. The primary incentive of the fund manager is not to generate income for student use.
You then have the same problems on the administration side. Their chief objective is not to lower overhead for students, but to increase admin count, payroll, nonstudent "research". Arguably this culture permeates down to alumni giving which is why oftentimes gifts are restricted. Alumni do not want gifts to fund admin largesse. Administrations with clear mission statements ('debt free students') would have far more leverage in fundraising towards that goal.
So to complain that using endowment for tuition is "cheating" is missing the point: endownment is a critical to bridge the gap between student labor value and total tuition.
Instead, we should look at universities with higher endowments with deep suspicion. Is it a culture of misaligned incentives that is resulting in a huge debt burden to students ?
Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?
Right, but your primary example - and this is a condition (as in "symptom") that dominates most media coverage of US higher ed - is Harvard. Harvard is not a good example, as it's not representative. A "culture of misaligned incentives?" OK, what concrete connections between endowment, culture, and the "alignment" of "incentives" do you think apply to, say, UMass?
_Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?_
All universities have a debt-free path to students (these are not kids, they are adults). It is called "paying up front" or "paying when you receive a bill." We obviously know that is not feasible, but I don't look for changes to the dealership model because Subaru does not provide "a debt-free path to car ownership."
I'm not sure I accept that work-centric universities prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal. The story is an advertisement for a college. It is published by a news source that seems to have a lot of stories critical of colleges.
The story does not say specifically that all students graduate debt-free; for students who graduate Hard Work U (I think the "you" is misplaced) and take loans, the average debt at graduation seems to be no different than some CUNY universities. Hard Work U forbids federal loans - not "offer a path to debt-free" but forbid it. Federal loans may be subsidized - and gosh, wonder why they started with the fed before moving on to private loans? Wonder how their revenue streams work?
You will notice also that there is no graduate program, where a considerable amount of student debt is held.
Also, from what I can tell, CotOzarks' annual tuition is considerably higher than the in-state tuition charged at the state school I work at, which has been consistently defunded at the state level. We service nearly 10,000 secular students; "Hard Work U" (this is branding, dude) services 1.5k deeply religious students and still advertise as a liberal arts college! Land-grant unis, regional comprehensives, small liberal arts schools, cannot at all replicate their...unique business model.
But we can call ourselves universities. I wonder why it's not "University" of the Ozarks? They're accredited by HLC, so I don't think there's a quality issue. But they do advertise as a liberal arts school and seem to have a lot of these "jobless majors" I keep hearing about.
The historical and material conditions that cause students to accrue debt are not going to be answered by "just offer summer jobs." The idea that "too many" universities (how many, precisely?) have some "debt-free" option that they could just flip a switch on...I mean, yes, If I were a university, I would simply provide a debt-free option for students! C'mon. Most of my students have jobs during the semester; do you assume they would drop them if we offered private work against their tuition? Would you be surprised if the answer was "no"?
Jobless majors are not the topic. The debate in this thread is not about educational outcomes, but net cost and net debt, and how we got there.
You are free to spend time playing video games and not learning to prepare yourself for a career. That is a choice one makes.
Outcome can be the basis for a claim for fraud - but that battle is already being fought elsewhere.
The true issue is, what incentives are at play that result in so much debt? Why cant you say thay "1 summer job is enough to pay for a year of tuition" anymore (this used to be the norm in the 70s!)
Whats preventing your students from working the summer to pay for tuition?
It isnt students. They are working all the same. What incentives does the school have that are contrary to that goal
If I understand the US college debt trap correctly, the universities can raise prices however they want as long as the government can guarantee that banks loan the money to students the universities can pocket.
So universities have incentives to convince the students to take on as much debt as possible.
For the sake of thoughtful discussion, i chose to omit the topic of debt trap.
Your comment makes it painfully obvious that any attempt to tackle incentives discussion must by definition include all incetives , such as (unlimited) backstop of debt.
Fun fact about Berea College, researchers who studied it found that "white students who are randomly assigned black roommates have a significantly larger proportion of black friends than white students who are randomly assigned white roommates" [0]. Not all papers have found the same to be true [1], so there I personally think there is something especially propitious about the setting for breaking down barriers between groups, e.g., the strong egalitarian vibe/shared work experience.
There is no explicit incentive in Universities to make innovations(or work) at the current state-of-the-art of Eng. in software. At least where I live (Chile), we have outdated courses, filler courses that even some teachers say they could be shorter, we have not "a big and fruitful community" of programmers, and so on.
You are NOT rewarded for knowing more info, techniques or anything that are not in the courses. Do you know Linux/Unix? Fine, no one cares. Do you know X language with Y framework? That doesnt give you more grades or be able to skip courses (you cant skip). Do you know about cross-compiling, new shiny things about the field that could be INTERESTING? No one cares.
At least they could make a club or especial program, but nope.
I am from Missouri and still provide a lot of advice to first gen college folks in that region.
I don't know anything about Berea, but I cannot recommend College of the Ozarks.
I can't be more clear: this is a submarine about a terrible college that no one should attend.
First, and most importantly, College of the Ozarks generally has a really terrible educational product. Really, TERRIBLE. It's difficult to over-state how bad the educational product is. Go look at their CS faculty. Almost all community colleges have way better faculty, to say nothing of other four year colleges.
Second, the work program is generous but not amazing. It's an $11K tuition waiver, which comes out to 15 hour/week job at $20/hour. Room and board is expensive, and off-campus living isn't as cheap as other options in Missouri.
Third, for students in Missouri, Truman State is an infinitely better product at roughly the same price point ($12K, and no one is stopping you from getting a part time job on or off campus...). It's a "public LAC" so the product is in the same category, but infinitely better.
Especially in CS, students are MUCH better off going to Truman State and working part-time. They'll make up the (SMALL) difference in part time job earnings through a combination of lower living expenses and way better internship placements. I'd be astounded if the average Truman CS student doesn't come out financially ahead of the average CofO student at graduation, and will eat my shoe if the Truman CS student isn't better off after 1 year of work.
Fourth, better not be homosexual or you'll be expelled / forced out. Always worth mentioning because many students don't realize this until too late.
But, again, I cannot overstate how bad of a deal CofO is compared to state schools (Truman, UMSL, Rolla) for Missouri residents, especially in high-demand fields like CS. The cost isn't that dissimilar and the faculty and educational quality at the state schools are infinitely better. I mean, go compare the CS faculty. Truman and UMSL have real CS programs staffed by real CS faculty. Rolla is a proper research university. CofO, on the other hand, has one faculty member whose industry experience is closer to "IT" than "SWE" and their curriculum is out-gunned by most community colleges. Honestly better off getting industry certs through a community college program.
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[ 7.8 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadSeveral students in my high school also attended Alice Lloyd over the years. One of my closest acquaintances did custodial work and always spoke highly of it and seemed to enjoy being on campus and working there.
I think both of these schools (and I am sure the others) perform a much needed service and I would love to see more schools offer something like this. I was a work-study student in college but of course $8 / hr didn't cover much. It would have been nice to have some sort of merit / effort based compensation above the cash pay to help offset tuition costs.
Is it atypical for a Christian college to be attended by Christians? I toured their campus years ago with a friend that was looking at attending the school. I'm not sure why you would go there if you weren't a Christian.
Places like Wheaton (Chicago), Cedarville, Liberty, CofO, etc. are very much the outliers in terms of how church-affiliated higher ed institutions behave toward non-fundamentalist-conservative-Christians.
BTW, being Christian is not enough at CofO. The important thing is to be socially conservative and fit in with the fundy crowd. Mainline lutherans, for example, definitely aren't welcome. The national-ethnic-religious-political belief complex that is de facto required to get by at CofO is probably not even recognizable as Christianity to a European Christian eye.
Anyways, with respect to CofO, the bigotry is really not even relevant. Compare the CS faculty at Truman/Rolla/etc. vs CofO. The work study program is a $20/hr job for 15 hours a week. You can get up to $15/hr easy and your improved internship placements out of Truman/Rolla will put you ahead of CofO even before graduation. Ten years down the road there's probably close to an entire 0 in outcome differences.
This is a two-year school, in the remote desert. Enrollment is about 30 students, coeducational since 2018. There is no tuition, but students work ~20 hours/week at jobs including cook, irrigator, butcher, groundskeeper, cowboy, "office cowboy", dairy, and feedman.
The college was created to both train and accustom technical staff for powerplant engineering positions in the highly-rural western and mountain states.
Most students transfer to a 4 year institution to complete their degrees.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
There've been a small handful of HN submissions, though no discussion.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22deep%20springs%22
Several comments as well:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There was a detailed profile of the school sometime in the past decade or so. I've been past it on CA-168 and recognised the name.
I thought the article had run in the NY Times or WSJ, though I don't find hits for the period I had in mind.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22deep+...
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=site%3Awsj.com+%22deep+spri...
It's hard to express just how remote it is. You'd have to head out into Montana or Alaska to do better.
(I'm not denigrating it. I've been a landscaper, dishwasher in highschool who was yelled at in Chinese nightly for not doing jobs other than dishwashing--like washing/polishing his car between rushes, General contractor, auto mechanic, and electrician. I know about manual labor, and I never liked it after my 40's. This program looked fun though.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range
"Home on the Range" is a classic cowboy song, sometimes called the "unofficial anthem" of the American West.
@dredmorbius's summary is good. Couple additions/nuances:
L.L. Nunn founded Deep Springs to train public servants/leaders. He hoped they would play a larger role in society. (Some do, some don't...). To all incoming students, the school distributes a pamphlet written by Nunn called "The Voice of the Desert", in which he articulates his vision for the school and his appreciation for the mysteries of the wilderness.
Nunn founded at least three schools in his lifetime. The first was intended to train young men to become technical staff at his power plants. (Nunn supplied Tesla with power for some of his early experiments in Telluride, CO.)
The second school was founded back east. Its student body walked out en masse to volunteer for WWI.
The third school, Deep Springs, was founded in 1917, in a location isolated enough to preserve its student body in the face of social pressures. (Worked!)
At least nominally, the student body hires and fires the faculty, determines each semester's curriculum, and conducts the admissions process to replace itself. The extent to which it does that independently varies from one school administration to another. (When I was there, we had T-shirts that said "[[frontside]] In 1917, two radical social utopias were born... [[backside]] "Only one survived.")
It's a feeder school for larger, more prestigious institutions you've heard of.
It's also a really f*cking hard place to live, work and study, because of the sheer immensity of your responsibilities, and the intensity of social interactions.
Labor: I served as the farmer's assistant, the dishwasher, and the dairy boy when I was there. The dairy boy, the feedman and the cowboy are all responsible for the care, feeding and continued survival of livestock; the butcher is responsible for their merciful killing. The farmer's assistant has to grow the alfalfa to feed the cattle (or sell). Labor's no joke, and you can't screw it up without other people suffering. Life at DS is heavily interdependent, and the consequences of mistakes are real. (I've been told this may not be true at most liberal arts colleges...)
Social: If you don't like someone at DS, chances are you will still see them 4-5 times per day, including every meal, for two years. The school has an isolation policy. It is the only human community in a high-mountain desert valley. The near towns (Big Pine and Bishop, CA) are about a 30-40min drive away, IIRC. The students stay in the Valley for the length of each term. The only ones who leave are: 1) "the driver," who picks up groceries and applicants during application season; and 2) folks with a medical appointment. That's it. It also has a "no drugs or alcohol" policy during term, the enforcement of which is variable.
You might say it's free for a reason; you pay in other ways. I made several lifelong friends there, but I'm not sure I would counsel my younger self to do it again.
Every year or so, a mainstream media outlet rediscovers it. CBS did last year: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/deep-springs-college-california...
Wikipedia has a list of notable alumni. Many are named Bill.
Bill Vollmann
William Vandenheuvel
And a third Bill who supposedly founded DARPA. I'm blanking on his last name right now.
The founding director was Roy York.
There's Robert Sproull (1918--2014), who was director of ARPA. Might you be misremembering his name?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sproull
yeah, sure
Even today, if you go to a Ashram/Japanese Zen temple, you're expected to go and clean stuff. The surrendering of the ego is itself quite therapeutic, if you come from a Western culture where the ego is so massively magnified/glorified.
Sadly, Indian culture is itself being choked off by vestigial-British Govt. in India, so won't be long before someone writes the equivalent of the "Darkening Age" for Asia.
> Our European visitors are important to us.
> This site is currently unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area while we work to ensure your data is protected in accordance with applicable EU laws.
Besides the irony of "being important" and GDPR [0] not having been solved for a simple website, this is the first time in a long while that I see something like this, and it made me think (again!) how weird, unfair, and strange the world is, in relation to laws and regulation.
[0]: https://gdpr.eu/
Should instead read:
> This site has been unavailable to visitors from the European Economic Area for years, because it makes more economic sense to us to sinkhole Europe rather than bother to comply with GDPR.
Things suddenly start making sense when you look at them from this point of view.
The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, administration, etc. -- the day to day necessary jobs that keep an institution running -- at all, or enough to be offsetting the costs of those professionals and paying for salaries of the faculty. And you wouldn't want students to be handling many of the jobs that rely on people to conscientiously do them for years, and have institutional memory in mind. They're there to be students, not workers. That's why most student jobs are of the type similar to dorm cleaners, kitchen staff, library, computer room, etc. -- short term temp work requiring no great specific skills.
The article itself acknowledges that much of the income comes from the endowment, grants, donations. If you wanted to start a school on the premise of student labor paying for it, without these existing sources, there would be no way. The cost of running a school is simply way too high in developed countries to do this.
Having students work is not a bad thing. But it isn't some utopian possibility to solve the problems of the cost of education at nearly any typical school. To make this possible you'd have to start something like an educational coop in a developing country. And I doubt that would be a significant contributor to higher education, until it got larger and more professional, at which point you would start to run into the exact same issues above.
I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.
He's not.
Its like writing to tell people they are illiterate
> loquation
> Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.
was responding to my perception that his or her written / implied sentiment was conveying that it's so strange that students would need to work to be able to afford to go to college. That we should have a system where students have a special right to get something for free as an entitlement of society.
Now, whether that is a good policy is a legitimate question. My response was to point out that the above kind of thinking regards students as a special class of people who should be insulated from having to work. While implicitly, it is ok for other people to have to work or pay taxes to fund that privilege. Often that attitude is easy to adopt when you forget who's paying the bills.
You already believe that, you just disagree on the definition on student. Or should we take 14 year olds out of school and send them back into the coal mines?
This is even referred to in loquation's post, by describing it as an ideological problem. I agree, and would pose the ideological question as follows: Should education be treated as an individual investment or a societal investment? If it is an individual investment, then it should be paid for by the student either up front or through debt, and that investment is recouped directly through higher income. If it is a societal investment, then it should be paid for by society as a whole (i.e. publicly funded through taxes), and that investment is recouped indirectly through opportunities that require a more educated society.
That said University's don't exactly make an external product to sell, so some money would need to flow inwards from grants or otherwise for salaries and capital expenditure.
Even teenagers are perfectly capable of most administrative tasks. People rise to the challange, if the environment is right
Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally?
I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.
Anyone who has operated in a student-run organization will tell you that when you're doing anything complicated (like managing a college IT department), the ~4-year limit on institutional memory is a serious issue, especially when it involves people who mostly don't have the experience to be proactive about documentation (and, I should note, institutional documentation is not an easy problem for organizations filled with seasoned professionals).
Both soldiers and drivers can be alone for hours and sometimes have to make life-or-death decisions during that time.
Students are students. Their job is to be students, not administrators or full time workers. That's why things run and maintained by students typically don't have the follow through and professionalism of people who are paid to do it.
We have this. They’re called grad students and if they hang around long enough we call them professors.
> Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors
A second semester senior without a job lined up negotiating a seven figure contract... what could go wrong?
> IT students handle the networking
This is already a thing at most colleges.
> mechanical engineers the boilers
Might be possible, but could also be a disaster.
> hospitality management majors dorm maintenance
Students already do work in dorms at front desks and so on. Business majors aren't qualified to do plumbing, electrical, etc.
Students who are qualified to do plumbing and electrical are probably better off selling that labor on the open market.
At the end of the day, the other basic problem is that at most colleges, most college students who need work can get better-paying work than the sort of work that's available on campus. Why work in Uni IT over the summer if you can get an internship literally anywhere else that probably pays better and could become a full time job?
This system is only used in German-speaking countries but it works there. The basic is that students are employed by a company and work there half the time. In return the company pays for the studies in the other half.
Dyson Institute (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_Institute_of_Engineering...>) is something similar in England. All students are paid employees of Dyson while working toward their engineering degree.
It's called 'an apprenticeship' in the UK for example, and similarly elsewhere I assume.
Some universities offer them for professional degrees now too - I had a colleague at Arm who was part-time and a student on such a programme. (Two days a week year round apart from a break for exams iirc - quite distinct from the (more common) summer internship format.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_Coopera...
The school is paid for by the tax payer and the company pays the apprentice a salary that should represent the value they create as an apprentice.
The company also pays for additional courses organized by their guilds. For programmers and system administrators this might be how to build a pc or a network or how to build some software project.
It‘s a great system for companies and apprentices. I think there are even some Swiss companies that try to build similar programs in the US because they have a hard time hiring in the US.
While we're on the topic, can someone really explain to me what endowments are for? There's many universities that claim hardship but have multi-billion dollar endowments. I mean Harvard (the largest endowment) has over $2m per student. The "business" is clearly profitable without ever accepting a dime from students. I'm just unsure what this money is actually doing.
I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is to be like dividend investors, it does not appear (at least from what I'm seeing) that they are actually acting like someone with a goal to live off of dividends. There's more growth than that. Or there's something missing that I don't understand (more likely).
So yes, Harvard could cover just about all of their budget with the endowment returns, though they probably need some extra income to cover the holes formed by the restricted funds and avoid inflation pressure.
Is their current usage of the returns too conservative? Probably. Do they have an absurdly large pile of cash that they have no business holding on to? Not really; the investment returns roughly correspond with their current operating costs.
[^1] https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview
I was only using the more aggressive number as a thought experiment to the original poster about what it would take the cover the entire operating budget.
It’s not sitting there - it’s invested and working. Investment returns pay for operating expenses.
Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same? Why not theaters next? In the end, if keeping the balance in check is the main thing an istitution is bound to do, why not stop doing education (= expenses) and just focus on investments?
I literally don't understand what you mean. The purpose of the institution is to educate people (and other stuff.) They do that by investing money that they were given for this exact purpose.
What on earth could the problem with that be?
No only are they providing education to people, often for free, they're also lending people money to build and develop businesses along the way.
I think you've got some idea they have their billions in a Duck McScrooge style vault? They don't - being invested means they lend it to people to build things. It's all being actively used.
> Would it make sense for hospitals to do the same?
Many hospitals and health organisations have endowments. For example the Wellcome Trust has an endowment of $37 billion. I think they funded my wife's PhD in cancer.
> Why not theaters next?
Many art institutions have endowments. For example the Getty uses a $7 billion endowment to fund the arts so they're preserved for and accessible to people like you.
What is the issue you see here? If they kept it as cash in the bank it'd depreciate rapidly and they'd end up with none left.
In 1992 in Italy hospitals became "hospital companies", meaning what was once a public service with the sole aim of providing the best possible treatments to citizens for no cost, became at all effects a business (although still state owned) with incomes, expenses and a budget. You may think this makes sense, but since then our healthcare quality has tanked.
One notable side effect is that all hospital companies cut on the intensive treatment beds to save on costs, which backfired heavily during covid since we didn't have enough beds and many patients died without proper treatment as a consequence.
But it comes from Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_endowment#Modern_col...
> incomes, expenses and a budget
Government-provided healthcare also has an income, expenses, and a budget. They don't just spent whatever they want with no planning and no income.
The article itself notes that it's common practice only in North america, and when it is used outside of USA it's in a different way:
>In the United States, the endowment is often integral to the financial health of educational institutions. Alumni or friends of institutions sometimes contribute capital to the endowment. The use of endowment funding is strong in the United States and Canada but less commonly found outside of North America, with the exceptions of Cambridge and Oxford universities
> Government-provided healthcare also has an income, expenses, and a budget. They don't just spent whatever they want with no planning and no income.
Of course, but there is a big difference in having a regular accountability and starting to think in terms of business. Suddenly intensive treatment beds become "centers of cost", not vital but expensive tools required to save lives.
This comparison makes no sense.
1. GDP is a per-year measure, but an endowment is accumulated over multiple years. Therefore durectly comparing them doesn't really make much sense.
2. "some nation" includes some pretty small/poor countries. Should it be a surprise that an organization in the US is bigger than a country like Liechtenstein?
Isn’t that a crazy number? How much of it goes to a bloated bureaucracy?
Tenure means a guaranteed job for life, and the university needs the money to guarantee it. The position exists even if there aren’t sufficient student or research grants to fund it.
Harvard is a bad example to use here because they are so massive. Other schools aren’t situated as well. And yea the endowments have taken a life of their own but tenure is a part of why they exist.
There has been an almost unprecedented ten year period of growth in the equity markets. And the big endowment which I keep my eye on at least has done significantly better than the market. It's prudent not to count on that continuing--not that the school could turn on a dime with respect to their revenue mix anyway.
They want to make as much money off their endowments (savings) as they can, and spend as little of it as possible on things that they don't need to pay for. Note that while the endowment is huge, actually a large part of it is restricted in what it can be used for, by "generous" donors who put conditions on their money, funnily enough. Turns out that they don't want the money spent on just sending kids to school, they rather want to see their name on art in museums, on professorships, and on department buildings.
Harvard to take an example, has an endowment of $53B, roughly (https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy21_harvard_fin...). Approx. 80% of that has donor restrictions on it and only $9B is useable freely for anything desired.
Last year, Harvard's operating costs were $5B (roughly). To pay for that (roughly):
-- $1B came from student tuition
-- $1B came from funded research grants
-- $2B was released from the endowment
-- $1B in gifts, royalties, licenses, other income
In a sense, $2B spent from such an endowment is not too different from what you would plan for your own retirement. Admittedly, Harvard Management Company (investment arm) earns much better than average though.
It's a choice by these universities, how big they want to be, the ambition of their educational goals, and to some extent, yes their power and influence. They are no different than many corporations.
If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Public universities generally have little/much smaller endowments by comparison because they rely on government for their steady stream of revenue. And because of that they can, and have pressure to, fulfill policy-based goals of educating students at little to no cost, or heavily subsidizing it.
Some public universities are acting according to the incentives they've been given, and accumulating their own endowments to insulate against political unreliability, and you can also see why college sports are such an important revenue stream for them as a result.
Harvard is significantly different than most corporations because Harvard doesn’t pay taxes.
Yet Harvard is not a typical not for profit either, as you won’t find many non-profits with a $53B treasure chest.
> If you want altruistic behavior and free tuition, well, you want a slightly different system.
Yes, the majority want a different system, your average person doesn’t really like the fact institutions like Harvard/Yale have a combined ~$100B tax free war chest and supply 8 of the 9 lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court.
Harvard is free for people not in the donor class, so I'm not sure what your are asking.
Also, universities do research and teaching, and the research costs money separate from teaching/tuition concerns.
But it's the best time of your life!
That's why, I think, in some European countries, instead of giving debt to students, we give them a stipend. The society should be able to support students enough to study, so they wouldn't have to work.
I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him.
I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)
If governments are going to fund anything, education and research should be number one, the returns are not even complex to realise and it removes, or at least competes well with and provides alternatives to the corrupting incentives of privately funded research.
Went to a vocational high school for electrical installation and in senior year we did jobs around the school. My friend and class partner put up the schools first CCTV system and we did everything ourselves. I was crawling around in the ceilings stringing coax and 24V power wires, on ladders with a hammer drill mounting brackets, and in the court yard drilling holes through the walls into the deans office on the 2nd floor. That was a 2 month job.
Two other classmates did an amazing rewiring job in the automotive electrical shop with all new conduit bent to perfection, multiple parallel runs and all. Of course we were the top students in our class. We were hand selected for such jobs by our teacher who was a licensed master electrician so it allowed us to legally do work in the building. As long as you have a good head on your shoulders, sharp teacher and the right equipment you can achieve a lot with a little training.
My first day of law school. Big intro lecture from the Dean. "Quit your part-time jobs now. The amount of money you can earn waiting tables is a pittance compared to your tuition and scholarships." He had a good point. A student's job is to study and learn. People fail out of law school all the time. Every minute doing anything else other that studying increases the risk of that failure.
- Internships/co-ops prove that students in high-skill degrees can command high wages by working for industry. How can we capture similar sorts of value in other places, either by integrating real industry projects into class work or something else. My senior capstone project tried this, but integrating it across the entire curriculum is hard.
- Professors command high salaries, and are the largest single cost of most universities, but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors. We had a few student-taught classes at university, and in many cases they were regarded as better than professor-taught classes because student instructors can empathize with the other kids better. Again, scaling this to cover most classes is a hard problem.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "high". At most institutions, faculty will make $50K-$60K starting, max out at $100K, and often do not have access to a pension. In many states, you're really better off, financially, as a high school teacher or police officer.
Which, I mean, high school teachers are highly paid by some standards. But saying professors command high salaries on a tech forum where even new grads are probably making more than the average full professor is probably misleading.
> but with proper resources and support students can also be very effective instructors... better than professor-taught classes
1. It really depends on the course; undergrad-lead core courses tend to be a disaster.
2. On that note, there's an important confounding factor: undergraduate-lead courses are often "topics" courses outside of the core curriculum, which naturally attract better feedback than "broccoli and spinach" courses regardless of the instructor. E.g., in CS, a course on game design or crypto will always attract higher ratings than "core" courses like Data Structures or especially Intro Programing.
3. Good faculty do a lot more than teach. And I don't even mean research. Industry relations and job placement are huge value adds of a good faculty member.
There's an important split between courses that need careful pedagogy and courses that really just need engagement. For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops. Sometimes an undergrad will pass through who could totally teach the course, but that tends to be an exceptional student.
Once you have a bunch of juniors/seniors who know how to program, and assuming you're teaching a course that's primarily about applied programming (eg, not a proof-based CS Theory or Algo course), engagement becomes more important than pedagogy.
Student-lead courses can be great, and ARE often way better than prof-lead courses especially for "applied programming" type courses, but it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state.
My university (Olin College) was undergraduate-only, but your general point about good teaching being a rare skill is definitely valid. Our student body was definitely pretty high caliber both technically and in terms of explaining-things skills.
> it's probably not feasible to run core major requirements with undergraduate instructors as a steady-state
This seems to be mostly false, in the sense that many schools run huge class sizes for many core courses (cough couch Berkely) and in practice non-TA instruction in those courses could be pretty easily replaced with videos. It's not ideal, but seems to work OK.
> For an intro programming course serving all students, you really need a professional educator who is practiced at going through the slog of helping people understand for loops.
This is certainly true if you just hire some students and tell them to do their best, but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process. For example, it's reasonable to provide instruction for the instructors on how to be effective, and invest more in quality video or written content to explain technical details that a student might not be able to articulate well. In my experience, being taught by student instructors definitely also helps prepare students to teach as student instructors, in a virtuous cycle.
Many of the tools for doing this well don't exist in a cohesive form today, but to the extent that people are working to make education cheaper, this seems like a promising direction to investigate.
Berkeley is not a good counter-example.
There are usually several teaching professors doing a full time job behind the scenes -- handling a myriad of student crises, handling a huge quantity of special accommodations, plagiarism and other academic misconduct, behavior issues (on the part of both students and staff!!!), constant question bank maintenance, constant schedule tweaking, interfacing with faculty demands from down-stream courses, and so on. Those are all trivial, though. Most important -- by far -- is training and managing a large course staff most of whom have never taught a recitation or graded a homework assignment!
Scaling up from a class of 1 instructor and 40 students (at Olin 20 or 15 I'd guess?) in one class to class with 40 staff members and 1000+ students and several lecturers is its own skillset. Those instructors are not teachers. They are mid-level managers. It's a different job, and not one that most undergraduates are prepared to take on.
And the face that it's a machine matters. Teaching a few recitations or lab sections and grading homework is not even remotely the same as instructing a course.
It's a bit like saying that you don't need experienced management at a logistics company because, after all, everyone learns how to do the warehouse job within a week. True, but keeping that machine running requires institutional memory and is itself a full time job. And just because you can train cogs quickly doesn't mean many of those cogs would do a particularly good job at designing and operating the underlying machine. Or even a miniature version of that machine.
> but I think you might be underestimating how much better intentionally-designed support resources can make the process.
Having spent time both inside and outside the elite academic institutions, folks who use places like Olin or Berkeley as barometers for "normal" are wildly out of touch with 90+% of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the USA.
Students at places like Olin or Berkeley are already the cream of the cream of the crop. At Olin or Berkeley you have a handful of good student-educators every year. At normal places the acceptance rate is closer to Olin's reject rate, and the applicant pool is way lower quality. At normal places an above average Olin kid comes around once a decade or less, and the annual cream of the crop at Olin or Berkeley simply never pass through.
> [...] Berea’s $1.6 billion endowment covers around three-quarters of the college’s operating expenses for its approximately 1,600 students. College of the Ozarks has an endowment just shy of half a billion dollars; its endowment-per-student ratio is one of the highest in the country.
> Relying on this type of funding does limit the number of students that can be enrolled each year and can make the schools particularly vulnerable to changes in the economy.
So the students don't really need to work as part of the model. It's more of a "Large endowment and private donations enables colleges to not charge tuition".
But I do think that work experience is important for college students. Even if your work experience isn't directly related to your field of study, just having stood behind a cash register, gives you a lot of maturity when facing the job market after graduation.
BTW I'm Iranian and since I feel like everyone here is American I thought maybe sharing a little different point of view could be beneficial. I myself think of immigrating to another country a lot and honestly seems like everything here designed in a way to make us immigrate. From mandatory military service to economic problems and being disconnected from the world (more in a economical sense again where we can't have international transactions, but here I am connected to you informationally(I think I just invented a new word)!)
There certainly are countries that seemingly offer a lot, but before you sell Iran being a country of free academic opportunities, think twice about the fact that there is freedom of speech outside of it.
While respecting your opinion (despite the fact that you would not have the same freedom of speech without anonymity in Iran), I think it's naive to think that just providing you with free pseudo-education with no chance of real success or quality of life is what this thread is about.
Another point is that I currently don't have any anonymity. There is only one "mahdi7d1" on the internet as far as I know. And my username everywhere is the same. All my friends and anyone who knows me knows of my username and remembers it (Their curiosity of what 7d1 stand for makes them remember it!) So even a normal person might be able to trace down my activities on the internet and find my real Identity.
Also I haven't said anything to be afraid of lack of freedom of speech here. Moreover there is much more freedom of speech here than people both inside and outside realize and I would like to try to see how much there is!
Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more affluent regions.
This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.)
This turns up in India (particularly in technology), the Philippines (medicine), Eastern Europe / former Warsaw bloc (science, mathematics, computer programming), and in the US. For the latter, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has long had an excellent computer science programme. Its graduates are educated at the cost of Illinois taxpayers (both individuals and businesses), but tend overwhelmingly to leave the state. There's effectively no tech cluster near UIUC, and very little of one in Chicago itself. Tech employment in the state is ~320k vs. 1.4 million in California. And that's actually reasonably good --- 7th ranked in the US, ahead of Massachusetts, which at least has a tech tradition.
It's a bit hard to read by total employment and compensation, but my sense is that positions are less technically interesting within Illinois as well.
By position, top-10: CA, TX, NY, FL, VA, WA, IL, MA, PA, GA.
Bottom ten (starting at the bottom): WY, AK, ND, SD, MT, VT, HI, WV, DE, ME.
Top ten metros by tech employment: NYC, DC, LA, SJ, SF, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta.
Atlanta has 40% the tech employment of NYC.
https://www.cyberstates.org/#interactiveMap?geoid=0__usa
https://www.cyberstates.org/pdf/CompTIA_Cyberstates_2022.pdf
You touch an excellent point that I never factored in when looking at why western government organizations demand free education in poor developing countries through policy or loan measures.
People who are taking highly specialised degrees and training for free cannot work locally because there is no market.
You earn on reputation, interest, and skilled labour through these measures.
And add to this liberal skilled-worker visa entry programmes with work-to-stay requirements.
Rich nations to poor: you raise 'em, train 'em, and pension 'em. We'll work 'em, pressure down their wages and bargaining power through work-to-stay reqs, and capture all the surplus labour value.
Bond villains, eat your hearts out.
I always thought these aid and loan programs through organizations like IMF, WP, and countries require return on their investment beyond interest on principal.
This is why they include clauses related to education, democratic participation, financial and taxation reforms, etc as a condition of receiving the aid.
You can be less cynical and think they are advocating for reforms which make these countries grow and pay back the loan otherwise they might default.
You can be more cynical and think many of these policies are detached from what is needed on ground looking at impact.
For example, opening a particular industry or providing consumable aid often distort local markets and might impact local businesses and exports through currency manipulation.
Maybe you believe onerous regulation and compliance of first world without the enforcement budget and low corruption make these places less attractive for businesses. Introducing those as condition of receiving aid might be net negative in the long run.
It all depends on how you view with your lens.
Although countries who are receiving aid like this have no choice in the matter. They are desperate for cash. Power imbalance exist and can be abused.
In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and teachers.
While these are not universities per se, the opportunities they open up to students are top notch. You don't need an entire college education to "set graduates on a path towards breaking the cycle of poverty", which according to the article is what work colleges aspire to achieve.
This vocational education is also much more economically efficient than universities in the same country, mainly due to losing the weight of bureaucracy and credentialing structures. Teachers are well-paid, ops run smoothly with few personnel, and students get access to many new job opportunities completely free of charge.
First issue is, that basically everyone wants to study and actually goes to study, even if it's underwater basket weaving, and they already know that there are zero job prospects even at the time they are filling out the forms to go to college (~middle of the fourth year of high school).
The second is, that college gives you some benefits (almost free college dorms, food coupons, due to student-status, you can work student-type of jobs with some tax benefits, etc.), even people who wouldn't otherwise study, enroll just to get the "status", and people who want to study eg. english literature, but are not accepted for that programme, enroll to eg. electrical engineering, that they have no interest in, but it's easier to get in, and they still get the "student status".
The third is, similar to the second, even when they should finish their college (hopefully graduate,... or quit), they try to prolong the studying process, to keep the "student status" longer.
And the fourth, when they actually finish college, especially the ones with "useless degrees" (the ones, that there are no market needs for) have issues getting a job, since a lot of employers for "shitty jobs" (baristas, etc.) prefer hiring people with student status, due to much simpler hiring and firing process, much simpler bureaucracy and a bit better taxes.
So yeah... we (the taxpayers) pay a lot of money for a lot of students who either intentionally study stuff that we don't actually need (and the added value of that education in the later job (eg. barista with a masters in ancient greek) is basically zero), and for students who just abuse the student status for all the benefits and student work, making job-seeking harder for graduates.
There is also an additional problem of people studying something that the job market needs (medicine, engineering, CS,...), and then leaving the country the moment they graduate and never paying back their studies (because they never pay taxes in our country).
There are many alternative systems, that I'm not 100% they'd work better, by eg. colleges charging some tuition, and then graduates having to stay in the country and work in the field that they studied for X years (so their degree gives them some added value in their paychecks and then taxes that would bay their tuition back passively), or paying back their tuition directly if they want to leave or do some other, unrelated work.
I can't read the site from Europe. How are their European visitors important if they can't access the site?
I think the argument can be flipped. The problem is that of incentives and the wrong culture dont allow the debt-free, work-study program to be more widespread, by leveraging endowments.
Take for example a place like harvard.
Consider that the objective of a harvard portfolio manager is to grow its prestige and carry incentive payout, by increasing its AUM and reinvesting returns. The primary incentive of the fund manager is not to generate income for student use.
You then have the same problems on the administration side. Their chief objective is not to lower overhead for students, but to increase admin count, payroll, nonstudent "research". Arguably this culture permeates down to alumni giving which is why oftentimes gifts are restricted. Alumni do not want gifts to fund admin largesse. Administrations with clear mission statements ('debt free students') would have far more leverage in fundraising towards that goal.
So to complain that using endowment for tuition is "cheating" is missing the point: endownment is a critical to bridge the gap between student labor value and total tuition.
Instead, we should look at universities with higher endowments with deep suspicion. Is it a culture of misaligned incentives that is resulting in a huge debt burden to students ?
Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?
_Why are too many US universities failing to provide a debt-free path to kids; when the work-centric universities in this article prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal?_
All universities have a debt-free path to students (these are not kids, they are adults). It is called "paying up front" or "paying when you receive a bill." We obviously know that is not feasible, but I don't look for changes to the dealership model because Subaru does not provide "a debt-free path to car ownership."
I'm not sure I accept that work-centric universities prove that debt-free graduation is an attainable goal. The story is an advertisement for a college. It is published by a news source that seems to have a lot of stories critical of colleges.
The story does not say specifically that all students graduate debt-free; for students who graduate Hard Work U (I think the "you" is misplaced) and take loans, the average debt at graduation seems to be no different than some CUNY universities. Hard Work U forbids federal loans - not "offer a path to debt-free" but forbid it. Federal loans may be subsidized - and gosh, wonder why they started with the fed before moving on to private loans? Wonder how their revenue streams work?
You will notice also that there is no graduate program, where a considerable amount of student debt is held.
Also, from what I can tell, CotOzarks' annual tuition is considerably higher than the in-state tuition charged at the state school I work at, which has been consistently defunded at the state level. We service nearly 10,000 secular students; "Hard Work U" (this is branding, dude) services 1.5k deeply religious students and still advertise as a liberal arts college! Land-grant unis, regional comprehensives, small liberal arts schools, cannot at all replicate their...unique business model.
But we can call ourselves universities. I wonder why it's not "University" of the Ozarks? They're accredited by HLC, so I don't think there's a quality issue. But they do advertise as a liberal arts school and seem to have a lot of these "jobless majors" I keep hearing about.
The historical and material conditions that cause students to accrue debt are not going to be answered by "just offer summer jobs." The idea that "too many" universities (how many, precisely?) have some "debt-free" option that they could just flip a switch on...I mean, yes, If I were a university, I would simply provide a debt-free option for students! C'mon. Most of my students have jobs during the semester; do you assume they would drop them if we offered private work against their tuition? Would you be surprised if the answer was "no"?
You are free to spend time playing video games and not learning to prepare yourself for a career. That is a choice one makes.
Outcome can be the basis for a claim for fraud - but that battle is already being fought elsewhere.
The true issue is, what incentives are at play that result in so much debt? Why cant you say thay "1 summer job is enough to pay for a year of tuition" anymore (this used to be the norm in the 70s!)
Whats preventing your students from working the summer to pay for tuition? It isnt students. They are working all the same. What incentives does the school have that are contrary to that goal
So universities have incentives to convince the students to take on as much debt as possible.
For the sake of thoughtful discussion, i chose to omit the topic of debt trap.
Your comment makes it painfully obvious that any attempt to tackle incentives discussion must by definition include all incetives , such as (unlimited) backstop of debt.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w15970
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/25098785
You are NOT rewarded for knowing more info, techniques or anything that are not in the courses. Do you know Linux/Unix? Fine, no one cares. Do you know X language with Y framework? That doesnt give you more grades or be able to skip courses (you cant skip). Do you know about cross-compiling, new shiny things about the field that could be INTERESTING? No one cares.
At least they could make a club or especial program, but nope.
I don't know anything about Berea, but I cannot recommend College of the Ozarks.
I can't be more clear: this is a submarine about a terrible college that no one should attend.
First, and most importantly, College of the Ozarks generally has a really terrible educational product. Really, TERRIBLE. It's difficult to over-state how bad the educational product is. Go look at their CS faculty. Almost all community colleges have way better faculty, to say nothing of other four year colleges.
Second, the work program is generous but not amazing. It's an $11K tuition waiver, which comes out to 15 hour/week job at $20/hour. Room and board is expensive, and off-campus living isn't as cheap as other options in Missouri.
Third, for students in Missouri, Truman State is an infinitely better product at roughly the same price point ($12K, and no one is stopping you from getting a part time job on or off campus...). It's a "public LAC" so the product is in the same category, but infinitely better.
Especially in CS, students are MUCH better off going to Truman State and working part-time. They'll make up the (SMALL) difference in part time job earnings through a combination of lower living expenses and way better internship placements. I'd be astounded if the average Truman CS student doesn't come out financially ahead of the average CofO student at graduation, and will eat my shoe if the Truman CS student isn't better off after 1 year of work.
Fourth, better not be homosexual or you'll be expelled / forced out. Always worth mentioning because many students don't realize this until too late.
But, again, I cannot overstate how bad of a deal CofO is compared to state schools (Truman, UMSL, Rolla) for Missouri residents, especially in high-demand fields like CS. The cost isn't that dissimilar and the faculty and educational quality at the state schools are infinitely better. I mean, go compare the CS faculty. Truman and UMSL have real CS programs staffed by real CS faculty. Rolla is a proper research university. CofO, on the other hand, has one faculty member whose industry experience is closer to "IT" than "SWE" and their curriculum is out-gunned by most community colleges. Honestly better off getting industry certs through a community college program.