The University Has No Clothes

http://nymag.com/news/features/college-education-2011-5/

by joubert • 15 years ago

71 85 15 years ago

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

College is just an avenue to doing substantive work -- which is when the real learning happens.

GaryOlson• 15 years ago

So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree. Too many job postings minimum requirements include a college degree even if the actual work -- substantive or not -- do not need a college education. So, a person cannot start in industry in a less substantive position and move into a position which includes more substantive work.

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

So those who do not attend college don't have access to do substantive work? I agree.

Wow, is putting words into another's mouth a standard HN move now?

Getting into college is not an insurmountable barrier. Find a professor who is genuinely interested in the work you're interested in. Start learning the background information required to do the work. Between the two of you, you should be able to figure out a way to work together. This works for both financial and admissions barriers.

There are also many kinds of substantive work one can do without a college degree.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

I learned a ton in college that my job could never have taught me. I received an education. Of course, employers want training, not an education, and there the disconnect lies.

zwieback• 15 years ago

These articles always focus on liberal arts and private universities, which is completely uninteresting to me. I'd like to know the historic development of public school tuition for actually useful degrees like engineering and business, which don't have the steep salary curves of doctors and lawyers.

nkassis2• 15 years ago

Don't forget science degrees. But it's interesting to note that engineering degrees cost more than liberal arts degrees to universities yet in general students in engineering are paying the same. It's changing now, where engineering cost per hour are going up but liberal arts students are still subsidizing engineering students.

scott_s5• 15 years ago

This is my common complaint when the issue comes up. From the article, In a typical semester, one third of the students Arum and Roksa followed for their recent book, Academically Adrift, did not take “any courses that required more than forty pages of reading per week” and half did not take “a single course that required more than twenty pages of writing.”

I had semesters that were nothing but math, physics and computer science and they fall into the above category. There was reading in those courses, but it was mainly in a textbook, and 40 pages out of a physics textbook is a lot of material. Likewise, I didn't turn in any writing assignments for these classes, but I turned in problem sets and programming projects on a regular basis.

greencircle• 15 years ago

I like the approach that Summerhill and Sudbury students tend to follow: after finishing "high school", they work in the world, thus earning money and gaining experience, and then they attend college if they think it is right for them. They work for their tuition, and they don't party away their school life.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

A quotation inside the article points to the public policy issues connected to the value of college: "This isn’t just a matter of harnessing people’s resources more productively, Altucher insists. It’s a matter of harnessing the country’s resources more productively. 'Let’s take a step back,' Altucher says. 'What’s the other American religion? Owning a home.' For years, the government encouraged home ownership for all citizens. 'So we got more and more loans that were considered subprime, and look what that did. The idea, the religion of home ownership for all, turned into a national nightmare, a national apocalypse instead of a religion. The same thing’s going to happen here.'"

Indeed, if government subsidies for college attendance (government allocations of funds to colleges, individual grants for college attendance, and below-market-rate-terms loans for college attendance) change individuals' estimate of the cost:benefit ratio of college, without increasing the actual societal value of college attendance, then current college funding policy might end up being as harmful to the national economy as previous decade housing policy was.

P.S. This article had a previous submission (no discussion that time, perhaps because of the title change):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2522135

DanI-S3• 15 years ago

I'd like to know why American university courses cost so much. The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee universities can charge is around $14k per year. The majority charge substantially less than this. Whilst government subsidy explains some of the mismatch, it's still very significant. In addition, the cost of buying books, which seems to make up a gigantic portion of college costs in the US, is not even remotely as large.

I can think of the following theories:

- In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more.

- US faculty receive massively higher salaries.

- In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay.

- There is limited public understanding of the drawbacks of debt, so people are more willing to incur it by paying extreme fees.

- It's a big bloody racket.

Do any of these hold any truth?

joubert• 15 years ago

Perhaps because they are the best in the world and there is a huge demand (from across the globe) to get in? http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp

DanI-S3• 15 years ago

That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be the best in the world because they are able to charge so much.

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Thomas Sowell is one of many commentators who point out that United States universities will be attractive at EQUAL quality, because they are located in the United States. But indeed, as United States universities attract students from all over the world, that helps even second-tier universities raise the quality of their programs, by gaining diverse groups of students with reasonably strong academic ability.

eroded• 15 years ago

UK fees, even at the new £9k (~$14k) rate, are still heavily subsidised by the state. To study my course (Imperial, CS) as an overseas student is £22.5k (~$36.5k).

nagrom5• 15 years ago

I always thought that universities charge overseas students a premium as it's the only chance to make money?

nagrom5• 15 years ago

To approach your points individually:

- The wider middle-class in the US are used to paying for quality. It's not so ingrained in the UK mindset, where we have been used, up until recently, to government subsidies.

- The UK market is still emerging. Note that charging $14k is only available as of next year - and will most likely continue to rise. As it does, fewer will go to university and the 'value' will drop.

- US Faculty do have higher salaries (~x1.5 - x2.0 in my experience), but good people are deserting UK universities in droves because of massive cuts in salaries, conditions and facilities. My own research group had seen 4 people from 25, including 2 faculty, leave in the past 12 months for better-paid positions abroad. I expect that we'll see another 5 go in the next 12 months. None of them have been replaced.

- Typically, a college degree in the US has been worth the outlay. It's only the last 3-4 years that people have been questioning the worth of the college degree as an investment en masse, i.e. the US market is not currently stable and won't be so for another few years as people begin to reconsider what was previously a no-brainer. This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary).

- In the last 10 years, in the UK we have begun to view a university as a business. We're asked about cost centers, what we can sell commercially and requested to make PR material for wide circulation. As a business, we are forced to charge what the market will bear. But because there's not a huge amount of competition between universities (at least on price), that doesn't make for a particularly healthy market.

wyclif• 15 years ago

I find most of what you say here fairly uncontroversial, but this raised eyebrows a bit:

This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary).

That seems to violate a fundamental law of economics to me: If the demand for a good increases relative to the supply, the price will increase, which will reduce demand. If the supply of the product increases then the price will fall, encouraging more people to buy the product. Prices adjust up and down until the demand matches supply. So cheaper prices for degrees, by allowing more students to enroll, would seem to me to decrease status, not increase it.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Some of each of the above.

In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more

True for a lot of places. Last I heard you could get Harvard for free if your parents make less than some reasonably large amount ($70K or so)

US faculty receive massively higher salaries.

True, especially compared to the UK. There is in general a lot more money floating around the US university system to make life easier. My officemate recently moved from a postdoc position here at Big-Name American University to a lectureship at Mid-Ranked UK University and was bitching about how he lectures two and a half courses per semester (as opposed to the usual one course in the US) and has to do ridiculous things like taking out his own garbage because the university won't pay for cleaners.

In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay

Well if we're comparing to the UK, then the UK is if anything more concerned with the status conveyed by education. The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school.

The main reason, in the end, is that the US is the only major country where the higher education system isn't primarily an arm of the government. Great private universities just don't exist in other countries. There are upsides and downsides to this -- the upside is that America has most of the best universities in the world (can you imagine if it didn't?) and the downside is that they can be pretty darn expensive.

__rkaup__• 15 years ago

"The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school."

I've never seen people judging based on high school in the UK. Who, exactly, is doing this?

nhangen3• 15 years ago

I think your first and last points are probably most accurate.

Rich people will pay, and poor and middle class students will use grants and loans to get through. The problem with that is the loans seem like a great deal, because of the racket, and only when students get out of college and are still waiting tables to they realize that the coming out of school with tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of debt, debt which you cannot escape, is a bad deal.

Perhaps I'm jaded because I funded my education with student loans that I used to receive a B.S. in Psychology and wish I would've studied engineering. I tried to move into post graduate studies, but I couldn't afford it - by that time I had a family and couldn't afford the time away from work.

The military paid off my student loans, but my degree has been useless since.

hugh33• 15 years ago

My deepest sympathies for your degree in psychology.

It seems that the best thing we could do for the university system is to stop treating all degrees as equal. We need folks standing outside the university gates on day one of freshman year going "Hey you, what are you studying? Cultural studies? Hahaha, no really, here's a calculus textbook, get to work."

dvvarf2• 15 years ago

One thing that gets lost in most of these debates is the fact that many students don't pay the sticker price that universities advertise. At most of the top 50 universities in the US, something like 50% of students receive some sort of financial aid/subsidy. These discounts are often substantial.

The $50k sticker price is a tool universities use to price discriminate based on a family's ability to pay and how much a university wants a student. Thus, it's not crazy to see a talented student from a low-income background paying something like $2k a year to attend a top-tier university. Of course, this doesn't really answer your question. This phenomenon still leaves the 50% of students paying full freight, and only applies to wealthy universities that can afford such financial aid programs.

nkassis2• 15 years ago

Financial aid is pretty hard to obtain now days. Your parent's must be in the lower range of salaries combine for you to obtain anything other than unsubsidized loans. Pell Grants and other such things are pretty uncommon from what I've gathered. Once I managed to become independent as a student, I was making too much (35k a year) for any student aid so I had to pay full price (albeit I was smart enough to go to school in a state were education is pretty cheap, Florida if you have to know).

Daniel_Newby• 15 years ago

"The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee universities can charge is around $14k per year."

My US alma mater, a middle-of-the-road state university, costs $9k per year for residents, or $21k per year for non-residents. A lesser university is $5k per year, and a junior college is $3.5k per year. (Tuition and fees only, room and board not included.)

Lewisham2• 15 years ago

This has only been true very recently. It used to be about $3k a year, and before that it cost nothing at all, and before that, you got paid to go to university with a grant.

Only this year has the UK launched these awful fees (did you see the riots?) and now put itself in a position where students are now paying the same as some of the public schools in the US. If there was an easy way for UK students to get California residency, it would be cheaper for them to come here than go to a domestic university, as the overall cost of living is much lower.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

As someone under a ton of debt, I'd like to know the answer to your question too.

For a fun-time experiement, plot college cost vs. :

minimum wage inflation health care

since the 70s or so.

Right around 1980ish, health care and college costs started heading for the roof relative to inflation.

edit: I haven't worked the math to differentiate between average cost of ivy league schools and average cost of state schools. I think the current difference sits at 4x or so for list price.

yummyfajitas2• 15 years ago

Right around 1980ish, health care and college costs started heading for the roof relative to inflation.

Interesting - right around the time computers started making business processes way more efficient, a few areas unaffected by computers started skyrocketing in cost (relative to inflation).

I wonder what could be causing this phenomenon?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease

wisty• 15 years ago

You are forgetting - a bubble is a bubble.

The US has too many students, and not enough seats. Just like California had too many house investors, and not enough condos.

Of course, there might be some structural reason (the UK has better state sponsored education, or the size of the US means there's more competition for the top 2 schools), but it's mostly just transient.

There's a mad dash for the top schools. Don't ask me why. The top schools crank their prices through the roof, spending their gains on new buildings, or bonuses for the administration, or football scholarships, or maybe even research. The flood of new grads on the market means you would have to be nuts to employ somebody without a sheepskin, so the cycle cranks up a notch. Only to fly apart when the affordability ceiling is reached (and few grads have a sheepskin, and suddenly people start looking for bright high-school leavers for such essential jobs as keeping HR records in order), or you can't even get a job as a burger technician without a PhD.

nazgulnarsil• 15 years ago

Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

The more they raise the prices for those willing to pay the more money they'll have to subsidize brilliant students who can't.

"normal" people should be studying practical skills. It's a product of our egalitarian mindset that we regarded the status of research institutions as everyone's right, and then used subsidies and legislation until the elite institutions were so watered down that their degrees became a joke.

You can't give away status, status will just flee and look for darker corners to hide in.

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

> Universities don't charge enough [...] there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them.

And that's bad?! What about public schools―free tuition!

Universities―all education and knowledge―should be free. It's unfortunate teachers and teaching materials are in short supply, and hence we have to afford these to only those most "willing", but stratifying education by cost is a very poor method.

Look at the UK. Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Some institutions can now charge GBP 27,000 for a degree―which may or may not be of any use!―which students will repay the rest of their lives.

Twenty-seven thousand pounds, in the scheme of things, is chickenfeed. It's certainly much less than the opportunity cost of going to university for four years.

Students need to take responsibility for their own education. You've got four years, hundreds of different lecture courses open to you, and a five million book library -- it's a huge opportunity to educate yourself, but it's up to you to actually extract education from it. Many students will acquire knowledge which will be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, or even millions, over the course of their degrees. If you haven't extracted a mere twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth, that's your own damn fault.

People who complain about not getting their money's worth out of university education are like people who go to Disneyland, sit on a bench near the entrance all day, and complain that it wasn't worth the money.

dgordon• 15 years ago

"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them."

However, people who apply to universities in this class normally apply to many of them. Granted, some of them also get into many of them, but usually not all or most.

jimbokun• 15 years ago

Same as getting 100s of resumes for a job posting. Just because you only hire 1 person for the position does not necessarily mean that you hire only from the best 1 percent.

ams6110• 15 years ago

I've been wondering lately if the time might be right for the re-emergence of "guilds" i.e. organizations that promote the mastering of a craft. Not really "unions" in that the primary motivation would be teaching and improving, not bargaining with employers (though I realize that many modern unions do both).

A software engineering "guild" would seem to me to be a way to offer structured mentorship and certification of mastery without the need to also pay for years of busywork in humanities courses that, let's face it, are never applied by the vast majority of people working in our field.

MarkPNeyer• 15 years ago

a 'programmers guild' would be awesome. imagine learning to code at 14 instead of going to some worthless high school. you would start as an apprentice, watching an experienced programmer write code, helping fix syntax errors and spelling mistakes, while learning through osmosis. as a journeyman, you'd write simple unit tests, then more advanced functional tests, and then graduate by releasing your first app into production. by age 18 you could have four years of real world coding experience, while having earned a salary (albeit a small one) from age 14.

ZackOfAllTrades3• 15 years ago

Zoho does this. http://blogs.zoho.com/general/how-we-recruit-on-formal-crede...

nprincigalli• 15 years ago

That's how it works with many opensource projects. You get around, contribute with docfixes, learn a little, then send a patch here and there, and sooner than you realize you can be doing contract or employed work related to the tools being used by the project, or to the project itself. IMHO, there's no shortage of well-paid work for those known to be talented by their peers.

daniel-cussen• 15 years ago

> [Peter Thiel's Stanford education got him] a job trading derivatives at Credit Suisse before he returned West to join the Internet rush.

Thiel got this job by taking a math test and getting all the answers right.

impendia3• 15 years ago

According to my calculations, assuming a normal course load and no financial aid, the students in my Stanford combinatorics class were paying $129.00 an hour, each, to listen to me lecture. And I'm not senior faculty -- I'm a postdoc a couple years out of grad school. Moreover, I'm not even properly an expert on the particular subject, I had to spend some time before lectures reviewing it and learning new material to lecture on.

No question, I'm the beneficiary of all this. I make good money to carry out independent research, and my department apologizes for those semesters where I am "burdened" with six classroom hours a week of teaching.

Good or bad, the purpose of elite universities is research, not teaching. There is certainly room to criticize this, but that's the career path the senior profs aim for. Elite universities hire the best researchers, and there is a trickle-down effect -- that is what you are paying for with a Stanford education.

Worth it? Dunno. Seems implausible from the perspective of just thinking about it, but looking around, the evidence seems to be that it is.

nagrom5• 15 years ago

I cannot find it online, but I remember reading an essay by an ex-faculty member in CS who eventually went to work for Sun. He thought that academia was a rip-off, training-wise, when compared to Sun. At his job in Sun, when he trains people he spends 40 hours preparing every hour of material. In academia, we spend two, perhaps three, hours per hour of training material.

I think it's probably fair to say that people overpay to be taught material by faculty who really view the lecturing as an imposition on their time.

impendia3• 15 years ago

I think it's important to remember that students are getting what they in fact paid for.

There are colleges which de-emphasize research and prioritize outstanding teaching. Harvey Mudd comes to mind as an outstanding example. But for whatever reason, top research universities have much higher clout.

I think perhaps because being at a top research university is ideal for exceptionally strong students; being around exceptionally strong students is very good for above-average students; and so on.

scott_s5• 15 years ago

I mostly agree, but it's quite possible that you taught your students better than a professor would have. One of my best math teachers in college was a grad student close to finishing his PhD, and I like to think I did a good job with my students.

lr• 15 years ago

I have no data to back this up, but perhaps the reason college tuition has increased tenfold in the past 30 years is that the government (especially US state governments) is subsidizing it less and less... I work for a university (two different ones in the past 12 years), and there is less and less money from the state going into education.

I also think we need to start looking at the $40K college education vs. the $160K college education. Unless you want to be a corporate executive, do you really need to go to Yale, Harvard, Stanford, etc? I think PG once wrote that there is no correlation between going to a very expensive school and being a successful startup founder...

redsymbol2• 15 years ago

While I don't have data to cite right now either, a decrease in government subsidies is more likely to push prices DOWN, all else being equal. Increasing loan disbursements will, effectively, increase the available money supply in that market (of young adults entering college); and significant increases in money supply are by themselves inflationary, i.e. tend to push prices up.

To help see why, imagine you have one apple to sell. Alice and Bill are quite hungry, and both have $5 to spend. The maximum you can get from selling your apple is $5, because that's all either has to offer.

Suppose I come along and loan $20 each to Alice and Bill. Now if one offers $5, the other has the power to outbid. This new situation certainly won't DECREASE the amount of money you'll finally get for the apple, and could in fact end up dramatically increasing your profits.

This is oversimplified, but illustrates the legitimate macroeconomic essence, I think.

Of course, we have to qualify this with "all else being equal", which the real world is too messy for. I thought total student loan payouts in the USA had been increasing on average the past few decades, but don't know for sure: can anyone verify one way or another? The best I could quickly find is the "Average Debt Over Time" chart here:

http://projectonstudentdebt.org/files/File/Debt_Facts_and_So...

redsymbol2• 15 years ago

Update: while government-sponsored student loans can be considered a form of subsidy, I realize now you were referring to something else, lr. So, my comment is kind of tangential to your point :)

ctdonath• 15 years ago

http://ocw.mit.edu among others:

Education is free. Certification is expensive.

billswift• 15 years ago

Education is always expensive, even if not in direct monetary terms. Learning anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Time and effort that you can't apply to other things - aka opportunity costs. I mostly read and study in my "spare time", but even that means I can't do other things.

scott_s5• 15 years ago

Quoth Altucher, "When [my daughters are] 18 years old, just hand them $200,000 to go off and have a fun time for four years? Why would I want to do that?"

I was in undergrad at Virginia Tech from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2003. The total cost was less than $30,000 for all four years. Of course, keeping me fed and housed all four years cost more. I find his argument disingenuous, because only the elite private schools cost that much. Of course, it would be equally disingenuous for me to imply that everyone has access to a decent state school with relatively low in-state tuition. But surely that should be a part of the discussion.

earl• 15 years ago

While the article has it's points, Altucher complaining about $200k for a college education is stupid. For every Stanford or Harvard out there, there's a Berkeley, UW Madison, U Washington, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Ann Arbor, etc.

rayiner2• 15 years ago

My GT degree cost ~$60k in the early 2000s. If you started today, it'd be north of $100k.

antihero• 15 years ago

Honestly I've learned more playing around on my own than I did at university. Lectures really aren't for everyone, it's a really old-fashioned, outdated learning style. Whilst secondary schools have progressed hugely, university's have stayed with the sit their and suck up knowledge approach. Which sucks for me, because I learn by doing things. I guess I learned a lot from labs, and doing projects, which were awesome. But sitting there in a lecture just felt so removed from what I was actually supposed to be learning about. Combine that with ADHD and I don't think I'll be graduating in the next few months :( A lot is my fault, but I really can't stand lectures, unless the lecturer is exceptionally engaging.

The University Has No Clothes

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