Higher Ed: Enough Already

https://www.profgalloway.com/higher-ed-enough-already

by samspenc • 6 years ago

85 89 6 years ago

verdverm• 6 years ago

For a professor, the author does a terrible job presenting the complete picture, and like most in academia, select those data points which "support" their claims. You should not trust their opinions.

If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30. Time to stop destroying the youth by de-educating them. Stop being so scared. Let locals decided how to handle things. Stop picking isolated stories and applying blanket rules.

Zigurd• 6 years ago

"Less deadly than the typical flu" itself amounts to cherry picking. Weeks to months of symptoms, and 4%+ rate of hospitalization for COVID-19 even in the college age group makes it much worse than a typical flu and capable of overwhelming health care systems if you put people in the college age group indoors in lecture halls, labs, meeting rooms, and faculty offices for 45+ minutes several times a day grouped with different people each time.

This also involves an invalid comparison: College-age students, if they were broken-out by age among flu deaths, would show a very low death rate from flu, and COVID-19 death rates would be 5X+ higher, as they are proportionately for other age groups.

Now let's talk about sacrificing the faculty on the alter of reopening.

xbmcuser• 6 years ago

Even if younger people are not dying some have reported lasting problems after. We will find out after 1-2 years only the actual effect on the survivors not dying doesn't mean nothing happened

chadash• 6 years ago

Can you point out some specifics that you disagree with? The author doesn't make the case that students are gonna die. It's more the staff and faculty, plus the possibilities that students are vectors for spreading the virus.

yardie• 6 years ago

That’s a serious assertion you are making. COVID-19 is 10 times deadlier than the flu across the population. Dropping to almost 0 for babies. But we can’t let infants run the country while everyone > 30 stays home.

claudeganon3• 6 years ago

We initially thought it might be true for the young, but the deaths of infants and severe complications in children now suggests otherwise.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200511142153.h...

bobthechef2• 6 years ago

FWIW, he’s a clinical professor at NYU and a showman.

geofft4• 6 years ago

If you look at the stats, Covid is less deadly than the typical flu for those under 30.

By "less deadly" you mean "once infected, more people survive covid than the flu," right? But isn't it more infectious - and doesn't the longer incubation time make it more deceptive? It's fairly easy to control flu outbreaks, even in environments like college campuses, by telling people to stay home. (And you usually don't even need to tell them that, because they'll feel too sick to not stay home.)

michaelmrose• 6 years ago

Getting covid at 30 is more dangerous than getting the flu at 30. If you want to argue otherwise please provide an actual peer reviewed study not a non scientists opinion piece or a pre print of a non peer reviewed study.

Even if it were merely as dangerous getting the flu at 30 doesn't result in you infecting as many people and not as many of those people subsequently die. Many people pass it on before they get any sort of symptoms and therefore are unable to just stay home and not pass it around.

Please stop passing around dangerous misinformation. Your advice could literally kill people.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

The admissions year for the class of 2025 is going to be extremely competitive between deferrals and closed schools.

jseliger• 6 years ago

Very true: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz...

Too many students or "students" wind up paying for the party for years or decades after they graduate. The incentive structures in academia are (mostly) not good and not properly aligned.

cracker_jacks2• 6 years ago

Professor Galloway also said:

--- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. ---

There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years. But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.

chongli• 6 years ago

I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place.

Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.

DataWorker• 6 years ago

Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.

take_a_breath• 6 years ago

==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.==

You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class.

Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.

geofft4• 6 years ago

This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly (re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as much value as they thought.

What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those (and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).

throwaway204855• 6 years ago

Or tantamount to an institution trying to preserve the actual quality and value of the education by avoiding grade inflation and watering down of material. Many homeless shelters have standards and will reject people who are a threat to the quality of their environment - there really are students who are the (learning) equivalent.

This is a hard problem. But the mantra "scale education" ignores the quality side, and somebody who is shuffled through a "scaled" experience without personally investing and then given whatever credential at the end is still not actually competitive for a job and isn't being done any favors - they've just invested a lot of time in something without much personal value. What's worse, they've diluted the perception and thus value of the educational experience for anyone else who attended the same institution, even those who did take it seriously and learn.

People still send rejections for bad reasons (ego, etc.), and the cherry-picked 85/87% example seems illustrative of that. But the answer to education isn't scale - it's quality and specialization. Not everyone really wants an academic experience, as anybody who has spent serious time at a school can attest to (throwaway because I'm in that group).

m0zg3• 6 years ago

Going to have to disagree. High school education in the US (and I suspect in many other countries) is done by folks some of whom shouldn't be allowed within 300 yards of a high school. I'm seeing it play out with my own kid. Math and chemistry teachers sucks beyond belief this year (and they can't be fired for bad performance - unions), so we hired tutors who fill in over Skype. This happens every year, with different subjects. This is not something a lot of other people can afford to do. Do you reject all those folks for "quality" reasons? Or do you admit the reality that the expensive US high school system is not where it needs to be and try to salvage kids harmed by it by letting more people in and offering remedial classes? You can still maintain quality by doing exams later and getting rid of people who can't pull their weight. Where I have problem is when they won't even give people a chance, even though doing so is technically possible in year 2020, through university administered MOOCs and such.

cracker_jacks2• 6 years ago

The quality issue will have to be addressed either way as an outcome of the current pandemic. Previously, there was no pressure to solve these accessibility issues because it was not necessary for the survival of the institution. In fact, the quote I mention shows that it better serves the institution to have exclusivity to improve branding.

Now with the pandemic, an institution's survival depends on this accessibility. And the bonus is that solution to this issue can greatly increase the accessibility to many more.

staysaasy• 6 years ago

This is especially tragic given the variation in career opportunities from different colleges. Many of the most highly compensated, high-upside careers are basically only accessible to graduates of top-tier institutions. Particularly in consulting and finance.

In my experience talent is way more evenly distributed than the recruiting practices of some industries would indicate. The best people whom I've worked with went to a mix of extremely fancy and very ordinary colleges. A few didn't go to college at all. It's a real shame.

closeparen• 6 years ago

If what you need is an infrastructure for distributing lectures and grading exams, a university is overkill. The real function of a university is community. Communities that concentrate serious students and expect high performance from them are different in important and desirable ways from randomly sampled groups of 18-year-olds.

DoofusOfDeath• 6 years ago

As the parent of a college sophomore, I entirely share the article's fears and sentiment.

As a tangential nitpick, I was distracted by this statement: "The average age of a tenured professor is 55, meaning if you meet a 40-year-old tenured prof, there is someone at 70 teaching..."

I think it unwittingly supports another point from the article: "A combination of self-aggrandizement and elitism has convinced American universities that our services are worth indebting generations of young people, and now risking becoming agents of spread."

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

I think tenure at 40 is actually really early.

s0rce2• 6 years ago

Seems about right for North America, 12th grade education (18 years old), 4 year college degree (22 years old), 6 year PhD (28 years old), ~5 (3-7) years postdoc (33 years old), 7 year tenure track (=40 yrs old). If I didn't run away to a biotech startup after my postdoc it probably would be roughly this timeline.

Pretty insane really.

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

I'm confused. Are you implying that there's something wrong with a 70 year old teacher?

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

One of the biggest, if not the biggest, problem of online courses is cheating on tests. And yes, students cheat.

I'm talking here about Physics, but I assume it's similar in other disciplines of the hard sciences.

This is less so a problem for higher classes -- you can write take-home problems which are hard and uncommon enough that you can't google-solve them. But even then, students will solve them in a team. Or in other words: The best students will solve it, and everybody will have the solution.

For lower classes, almost by definition, the problems are all textbook. Yes, you can change numbers around, and formulations, but with some google-fu, most problems are shallow :)

The situation gets even harder if you want to be fair to the students who are not on campus. How good is their internet? How do you handle "my internet went down"? Or: I'm in this other timezone, your test is in the middle of the night! What I did in the last semester is allow the students to take the test at any time of the day, and give ample time for the test itself. But of course, that gives them more chance to communicate, and help each other. Even randomized tests (i.e. with changing numbers) do not help here, because often the complication is finding the right formula. Putting in other numbers is then trivial.

There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway.

The only way around that are taking tests in testing centers. But there is an issue of scale here, especially in COVID times.

The second problem is lab classes. It's very hard to teach experimental setup techniques online. How do you use a scope? Can you find a bad connection? Why did this resistor just blow up? You let the students play with sometimes quite expensive equipment, you can not expect them to just have that at home.

Third, online teaching is a very bad experience for many students. Not so much of the class itself -- I think this can often be remedied. But things like the exchange with other students, the opportunity to ask the professor face to face, but also so basic things like having to get up and out of your room for class instead of watching it (or a recording) from your bed. Not all, but many students struggled hard to motivate themselves to study sitting at home.

I do believe that it's better to have no in-person classes, or maybe a bare minimum. Teachers will try to teach the students as best as possible, but make no mistake, the education of many students will suffer.

throwaway6734• 6 years ago

There are only proctored exams, but they only help if you use a locked down browser. I'd rather not put what amounts to spyware onto my students computers. AND they are pretty easy to fool anyway.

Couldn't they also just use a second computer?

kfriede2• 6 years ago

Often times these browsers also require microphone and webcam access and track eye movement. Huge privacy violation, but I also don't have a proposal on an alternative other than proctored in-person tests.

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

Yes, or their phone. I mean, they could monitor your eyes with the webcam, and if you start rummaging on a different keyboard/mouse and looking away, this might be detected. But a phone? Easy to hide! What do you do if they want to go to the restroom?

Additionally, it puts another "barrier of entry" in there: Rich kids can buy more electronics to cheat better. Or pay somebody to do the manipulation for them.

nocman• 6 years ago

All of the proctored exams I've ever been aware of have either a human supervisor in the room at all times, and/or a video camera pointed at the student the whole time.

If you open a second computer they should know about it.

hirundo• 6 years ago

Soon, a locked down VR headset with eye tracking. It's step one for the matrix, maybe, but it does make it hard for the student to check their phone.

But employers will be tempted to use the same tech to measure employee time-on-task, and write employment contracts accordingly. Parents and teachers would want to use it to monitor study as well as exams.

The potential for social control is rather alarming.

kfriede2• 6 years ago

Would the solution be a shift in the expected outcome of testing to:

A) Project-based testing proving critical thinking rather than memorization, and

B) Testing with the understanding that as long as you can find the answer via Google, notes, or a book in a reasonable time frame, this shows you understand enough to proceed? Is this not how much of the working world works as it is?

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

The problem is that you must make sure you actually test the student, and not some other student, or a team. That's even harder for "take home" projects, because the time for exchange is so long.

I try to formulate most of my questions to not be just knowledge. With higher classes, I care less and less about how much they know, or just know how to find it, because the real problem is figuring out what they need to know, so to speak. For lower classes, this is a lot harder, because these classes often teach the basics required. You cannot be a good physicist if you have to google F=ma every time. The same way you can't be a good programmer if you SO-search for -loops.

dmurray• 6 years ago

That would be better, but it's harder to set and mark the test. Also it doesn't solve the problem of having a better student take the test or coach you through it.

zzedd• 6 years ago

I did this in my university teaching with (in my estimation) some success, even with large cohorts (1000+). But it takes a lot of design effort and friction with university administration. One extra element was to incorporate reflection into the project specification, teach students how to write reflectively and to assess it.

geofft4• 6 years ago

Students cheat because incentives aren't aligned - if I don't learn my intro physics material and I'm not taking any later classes that depend on it, the only difference between cheating on the exam and not is whether I end up with a degree. Employers, graduate schools, etc. want to see that degree, but they don't actually care whether I know intro physics.

As you say, this is less of a problem in higher-level classes: you ask them deep and meaningful questions that build on the intro material and you see if they can give a cogent answer. This process already has its natural conclusion when we ask Ph.D. students to write and defend a thesis - but almost until that point, we continue evaluating students based on homework assignments and tests with clear right or wrong answers.

It seems to me that the answer, then, is aligning the incentives. For any classes that have only textbook work, tell students that everyone passes them, and while homework and tests will be offered, they're mostly there so students know for themselves if they're ready to take higher-level classes. If you want to teach students to be students (which is a valuable skill on its own, although most of them should have figured it out in high school...), find some freshman-level classes that don't have textbook work - say composition or research - and grade those. As the years progress, move towards classes where students offer free-form responses and assign each student different work. If students seem like they didn't actually learn the intro material, go look at whether they took exams and how, and then send them back until they do. A few will party all freshman year, sure - but they'll learn that their sophomore classes do actually mean business now.

This does, incidentally, involve getting rid of the general requirements classes unless you can evaluate them in a non-textbook way. You probably can just work it into the major - biology or computer science or music composition students will genuinely benefit from understanding introductory physics, calculus, etc, so test that in those classes (and make it clear to them they need to achieve a "passing" grade in those classes). If you can't, and you also can't ask students meaningful independent questions, there's no point in having your degree require the ability to memorize "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell." I passed my college biology class with a C, and I am unsure what exactly would have been different if I'd put in the work to get an A.

s0rce2• 6 years ago

I think they do care if you know intro physics, well I guess it depends on what you are doing but if you are going into a related field in graduate school or industry they probably do want you to know this. Unfortunately, they don't have a good way to assess this skills/knowledge so they use your grades as a proxy.

asciident2• 6 years ago

This is a neat idea, but basically puts very high stakes on fewer assessments, and these assessments differ per student. So they will naturally vary in difficulty, and depend a lot more on the instructor, introducing more subjectivity into the process. I could imagine many serious issues of fairness "I got an impossible problem" and "who is the easy professor" in these cases.

lol768• 6 years ago

How good is their internet? How do you handle "my internet went down"? Or: I'm in this other timezone, your test is in the middle of the night!

At Warwick, we gave 24 hour windows for most online assessments. This resolves the timezone issue. Internet/connectivity and other claimed technical issues are handled by the existing mitigating circumstances process. Students are expected to provide evidence, and the development team is also involved in these cases (providing log data which may or may not support the claim). We have pretty good technical data, so it's usually fairly obvious as to whether the student's claim has any merit or not. The main advantage we have here is that we built the entire platform in-house when the realities of Covid-19 became apparent.

Some departments have looked at "viva voce" interviews after the exam as an anti-collusion measure. We already had the infrastructure to do source matching on e.g. coursework, so typed-up exam solutions were also fed into Turnitin in the same way.

Is it flawless? No. Students can still technically start the exam early and share the paper with others who start later. But I'd have expected to see much higher mark averages if cheating was widespread - and some of the informal discussions I've had with teaching staff have suggested worse performance this year, if anything. Part of this may be due to the incentives to cheat not being particularly strong due to the "safety net" policy which was implemented - students cannot be disadvantaged by taking the exams - their average mark cannot decrease, and will revert back to a grade based on non-exam assessed work if they perform worse.

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

Yeah, we also have seen generally worse performance in most courses -- I think it was really hard for the students to study at home, for many reasons. At the same time, we saw clear evidence of cheating in some courses, like rapid point increases at the last quarter, timewise, of a test. And people uploaded their exams for help, in a way they could be identified. These cases are now with the administration. Not sure what will happen to them.

bobthechef2• 6 years ago

The modern university is not a true university. It’s a scam that breeds savages that, at best, leave with some technical savvy and at worst inculcates in them toxic ideology.

“The Idea of a University” by John Henry Newman

http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/index.html

andrew_eit5• 6 years ago

Let me see if I understand this correctly (feel free to provide other perspectives):

Universities are afraid that by charging students $20,000 per year in tuition for an online degree, people will begin to question its value and possibly turn to other alternatives (perhaps, maybe also enrol in universities abroad that have low or no fees). Thereby pulling the curtains on the whole tuition fee charade, which is that the lion's share is used to find non-academic related expenses (I'm guessing: administration, outreach, marketing, a nice website) [1]

Universities that rely heavily on large sums of money from student fees are now faced with 2 choices: 1) Charge close to the same amount of tuition fees for an "online" university experience 2) Re-open and continue with business as usual, hoping the risks of Covid-19 transmission can be mitigated

Option 2 apparently seems like the more attractive version to maintain the status quo, which leads to attempts at convincing people that restarting face-to-face teaching is a reasonable way to go forward.

If this is what is going on, then this is yet another issue with universities that rely too heavily on income from tuition fees to survive.

The primary functions of (public) universities is to educate the population and conduct research. The ability to perform those functions must be prioritised and subsidised via public funds to guard against the influence of financial stability creeping into the decision making process on how to conduct activities for these primary functions.

I have studied in both the UK (9,000GBP/Year) and Germany (<€500 per year) and noticed a massive difference in the way both were run and my life as a student in each.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/22/less-than-...

claudeganon3• 6 years ago

Given the infection curve in the US, scenario 2 defies the laws of nature, so I hope universities don’t try it. I don’t doubt that some will, but under no circumstances should it be considered a reasonable option.

andrew_eit5• 6 years ago

It is the same in Germany currently, although the spread is well under control, most education institutions are still highly skeptical of reopening for the semester after Summer.

Miner49er• 6 years ago

From my understanding most Universities are currently planning on 2, but with going online after Thanksgiving.

dragonwriter• 6 years ago

Universities that rely heavily on large sums of money from student fees

Is that really normal? As I understand it, most major universities’ revenue is driven largely by research, and the total student fees barely cover the costs of dealing with students; it's true that students paying full sticker price provide surplus revenue, but that surplus revenue largely goes to subsidize the costs of students paying below cost fees.

rafaelturk• 6 years ago

I wish I could have Professor Galloway as a board member, however I'm afraid that I would to often hear undeniable truths about my management tough to digest

bo10244• 6 years ago

This all makes sense to me as far as it goes, but any assessment of university finances, the future of remote versus in-person education, etc, should have a lot to say about the following:

Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today. Schools are priced accordingly and they heavily invest in and compete on non-classroom factors. This includes facilities, support services, activities, athletics. Then there is just the socialization, dorm experience, meeting people, parties, on and on.

So it would be a totally reasonable and logical next step in history for schools to say, "Hey, we believe that a lot of the value we offer is the in-person experience. So we will offer remote classes for a lower cost, to many more online-education students." Like Ga Tech's masters program.

But, with COVID, the universities have backed themselves into a corner because they should probably make the next year remote, but they made all these expensive on-campus investments and to stay afloat they need the ridiculously high tuition money (including from out-of-state and international students as mentioned). So all of a sudden, they can't afford to admit that remote learning is a much less valuable product.

(One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.)

davrosthedalek6• 6 years ago

(One thing I am ignoring is the real difficulties and cost from professors to teach large remote classes in an actually effective way. I'm sure administrators will ignore it too.)

One of my colleagues teaches intro physics to 1000+ students remotely. It seems to work quite well actually. His TAs screens the questions students have -- it's not like there are 1000 different ones, many a similar/same. He says the large audience is actually an advantage: If he explains something bad/wrong, at least some of them will pick up on it and ask.

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

In other words, it sounds not terribly different than how many webinars are conducted

bo10244• 6 years ago

Great! One thing I've heard that at that scale, a lot of the professor's time is taken by student logistics type issues.

BiteCode_dev• 6 years ago

On one hand, as a trainer, I hate remote sessions. They are a pitiful mascarade of the real thing. On the other hand, there are many things in education that can be done without the teacher. Besides many (many, many...) teachers are worse in person than in a youtube video, because they are bad in the first place, and at least the format give you convinience and choice.

blahblahblogger• 6 years ago

The growth in the administrative side of education has been incredible as money from the government kept pouring - I read an article a few years ago about a university (Arizona?) with bloated administration that had built a dorm with a pool and a rock-climbing gym in order to attract students.

This is a problem for the exact reason you mention, but also:

This includes facilities, support services, activities, athletics. Then there is just the socialization, dorm experience, meeting people, parties
...they need the ridiculously high tuition money (including from out-of-state and international students as mentioned)

And these students from China, India, and elsewhere don't care about the great basketball team at the university or the football tailgating events or the pool parties! (or at least not as much :)

The bloat has also resulted in a proliferation of degree programs by focusing on what can make the schools the most money. Thus not providing the real-world/educational requirements that may be necessary but not as "fun".

andrew_eit5• 6 years ago

"Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today."

It's ironic isn't it. What would the cost of purely attending classes and exams be? $2,000 or $3,000 a year?

But no, if citizens wish to educate and certify themselves (from a reputable institution I might add), they must purchase the full package including all the bells and whistles that come with societies, events, parties, support, guidance councillors on the side.

It's really time to introduce a "I just want to learn and sit for exams" package for those unable or unwilling to pay for the extras.

kube-system4• 6 years ago

Those institutions absolutely exist, but no organization is under any obligation to cater to a pedagogical style they do not subscribe to. Simply go to a school that is the right fit for what you're looking for.

Maybe the reputable organizations have a more comprehensive approach because that approach is more effective?

ralmidani• 6 years ago

As a husband, parent of 3 young kids, and full-time dev, I only have time for classes, assignments, and exams. At my local University (UM-Flint), I pay almost $2,000 per 3 credit class. I’m also enrolled at Arizona State, which charges me about the same for its online-only experience because I’m “out-of-state”. In a way, I am subsidizing other students’ non-academic activities which probably have a net negative effect on society.

From a selfish and ideological standpoint, I would love to see non-academic aspects of universities dismantled.

g9yuayon• 6 years ago

Classes are only a fraction of the in-person university experience in the USA today.

I guess it really depends on the type of student. If I were a college student now, classes alone indeed are a fraction of the in-person university experience. Besides classes, I'd also need:

  - Challenging homework and rigorous scoring and feedback -- this would be critical to my future success. Standard tests won't cut it as I need my professors and tutors give me feedbacks on my proofs, my homework, my assignments, and detailed and usually lengthy and overly verbose reports. 
  - Opportunities to work on a research project with my professors and senior students. 
  - Office hour with professors. 
  - Seminar-like classes that students and professors dive deep together on a subject.

Luckily, remote learning can enable all such requirements. The only inconvenience I can think of is that it will be hard to work on a math-intensive problem on a whiteboard, but even that is solvable with something like an iPad and a stylus.

Things I'll miss: libraries. I used to check out 10 to 20 books a time, and spend hours and hours in my college libraries reading them and doing assignments. Classmates turn to friends. There's so much fond memories of hanging out with friends I made in college. We can probably make it up by hanging out online, but the experience will be different from face-to-face interactions.

What I don't need and will be glad to see them gone: all kinds of crazy sports programs. Yeah, football or basketball or whatever. They're nice, but I'm not sure if they are multi-million-dollar nice, at least not to me. I don't give a rat's butt if Caltech didn't win collegiate basketball for 37 years. So what? For all I know, Caltech will be the best college as long it provides the best STEM courses and produces the best research results in the world.

bo10244• 6 years ago

Great perspective and it also gets at a big concern I have: almost everyone seems to think “remote = large scale” but that means opportunities for student-teacher interaction go to zero. No reason it has to scale like that though.

krnsll• 6 years ago

John Cochrane, over at Hoover wrote about university finances in light of Covid19 a few months back. Worth a read.

https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/04/university-financ...

bo10244• 6 years ago

Thanks, yes, I remember reading this great article. An especially good section on endowments and how frustrating it is that 2008 is repeating itself.

empath752• 6 years ago

The problem is that have a college degree is the pre-requisite for getting a professional job, rather than having the knowledge that a college degree is supposed to represent.

kube-system4• 6 years ago

It is not uncommon for employers to accept equivalent experience in lieu of a formal degree.

empath752• 6 years ago

True and I have a manager level IC job where people above me have repeatedly asked how I got the job when I don’t have a degree and have to get people to rewrite job requirements every time I do a transfer here.

gfodor• 6 years ago

Remote learning is a ridiculously solvable problem with modern technology - the fact we seem likely to fail implementing it (due to the inability to imagine trying tools better than zoom) is both baffling and depressing. Send the kids VR headsets, get them in rooms on their PCs, phones, and laptops as avatars using screens and headsets as needed and start experimenting.

throwawaysea2• 6 years ago

Do universities actually make sense anymore? For me, I felt the majority of the benefit of college was not the classes but the social experience. But that is a hell of a price to pay for social experience. Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment. More typically, the knowledge gained over the course of four years can be learned in a self-guided way. In fact I would say that most subjects are better learned elsewhere, because you can pace yourself, you can choose to go deep or broad selectively, you can seek out multiple sources/perspectives, and so forth. I definitely am concerned that US universities are turning into a monoculture, and an especially dangerous one that is hostile (at times, physically!) to different viewpoints. Self-learning will lead to a diversification of admissible ideas. I also should mention that in big universities, professors are by and large not interested in teaching as much as their own research. The lectures can largely be replaced with a video that is recorded once and viewed by many.

The only real value a university confers is certification. Grades are really the result of a couple exams per class. The value of top universities' name on a degree is also largely built on the selectivity of their admissions process. But those students that they admit are not valuable because of the university - they're valuable regardless. So why not pivot to a world where companies administer certification tests for different subjects, at different degrees of difficulty/proficiency, at a low cost?

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

"Most subjects also do not need expensive facilities or specialized equipment."

The sciences, medicine, and engineering disciplines do. Computer science is a rarity in being a high-paying field that doesn't.

(Although, given that the average developer doesn't really require a CS education, as many on HN say, I wouldn't count on CS remaining a high-paying field.)

throwawaysea2• 6 years ago

Aren’t these facilities replicable at a much lower cost? My university had meager equipment for physics and mechanical engineering for example. I’m less familiar with the chemical and biology side of things though.

andrew_eit5• 6 years ago

"Do universities actually make sense anymore? "

I think the question is better phrased 'Do universities IN THEIR CURRENT FORM actually make sense anymore?'.

I used to share your opinion, especially after completing my bachelors but now that I am back in the system doing a masters (in the EU), I 100% see the value of university education (though I believe it should be free for all).

The idea that you can meet in a room, full of likeminded individuals and be taught by experts in their fields, given deadlines, exam pressure, assignments and struggle together with other students carries weight. Most especially if you are interested in science and research, in investigating and discovering, you will be taught the rigour and discipline involved in this.

Science is as much about the community as it is about the subject itself. All research builds off of previous ideas/experiments and many well-known scientists often conferred regularly and deeply with their counterparts around the world.

I think universities are an important place where young generations of future minds can come into contact with the members of these communities.

MintelIE• 6 years ago

Farming foreigners doesn't work well when global travel is shut down. And Universities get so much more money from foreign students that they've become focused on bringing in these folks over the people from the states who started them for the benefit primarily of the state's residents.

This really ramped up in the mid to late 1990s when we were told that Universities should be run more like businesses.

rayiner• 6 years ago

American universities don't deserve to survive in their current state. The United States already spends a greater %-age of GDP on public funding for higher education than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the U.K. (which together comprise 70% of the EU's population): https://mises.org/wire/government-spending-colleges-us-highe.... They're incredibly inefficient and broken institutions.

kube-system4• 6 years ago

I can't find it mentioned in those sources.. do those expenditures include loan principals or subtract income from repayments?

asciident2• 6 years ago

I'm confused how you arrived at that. So American Universities get 1.3% funding, which puts them about in the middle of the chart in your source, is at about the same level as Switzerland and the UK (who are both also 1.3%). Yet the US comprises more top universities than the rest of the world combined (according to pretty much university ranking site out there), and they are the ones doing it wrong?

9214• 6 years ago

Title convinced me that this has something to do with a modern reincarnation of Unix ed editor.

Higher Ed: Enough Already

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