The idiots do not realise they're paying for a chance to learn, not for a product to be delivered to them no matter what.
College has become a barrier to entry to the job market, and when a system is set up where someone's performance on (sometimes quite arbitrary) classes impacts their ability to get a job, those people aren't going to behave like model students, they're going to optimize for a high grade. I'm frankly quite surprised that this academician author can't understand this.
And why should anybody care at all about this disgusting and lowly category? They wanted to game the system, they got what they deserved.
> and many times taking on dangerous levels of debt
Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all).
> College has become a barrier to entry to the job market,
In most of the areas this is not true. In the other areas this is great, let's keep it this way as long as possible. I do not want to be butchered by a doctor who bypassed an assessment on their "performance on (sometimes quite arbitrary) classes" by simply paying more.
If anything, this performance assessment must become more and more rigorous and tough. We need a grade deflation, not a grade inflation.
EDIT: since the article is UK-specific, I am talking about the UK only. Student loans here would not cripple anyone financially.
Because (at least for me (and everyone I've spoken to)) university is completely useless. I haven't learnt anything in uni I hadn't already taught myself. I am 100% paying for the letters after my name.
In the US, "ignoring" them results in a large build-up of interest while you defer payments, and the debt is one of the very few things that can't usually be discharged in bankruptcy.
Because that "disgusting and lowly category" is the dominant demographic of users; get off your high horse.
> Student loans are quite a peculiar form of a debt. They can be largely ignored quite for a while (or ignored at all).
Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world, and if you don't get a solid job when you get out of college you can be absolutely crippled by it.
> In most of the areas this is not true.
In software development this is not true, but that's about it. In pretty much every basic job they expect to see a college degree or you're not getting a callback.
Your physician example is also a poor one, as most of what is learned in pre-med has nothing to do with practicing medicine and is just an arbitrary barrier to entry to a professional school.
If so, this world is doomed, and within a generation will be ruled by hordes of ignorant retards. I can only hope you're exaggerating (well, I know you're exaggerating, the universities that matter still do vet their intake relatively rigorously).
> Student loan debt is some of the hardest to escape debt in the world,
I'm talking about the UK here.
> In pretty much every basic job they expect to see a college degree or you're not getting a callback.
Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.
> most of what is learned in pre-med has nothing to do with practicing medicine
It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really).
By very definition most people go to universities or institutions that "don't matter" in your eyes. You can't rule out the majority of the population in a discussion about the nature of higher education just because it doesn't fit your narrative about what college should be.
Moreover, to assume that everyone at top tier institutions is there or is trying hard because they are deeply passionate about learning is absolutely ridiculous. I am at a lab at MIT currently and interact with undergrads here all the time. The community has a HUGE problem with self-imposed stress over grades and course load to the point where individuals are committing suicide because they falsely believe that if they are not successful in college it will prevent them from being successful in the work place. Why do many people put themselves through this pressure? Because they know having the words MIT on their resume will get them a great job.
> Incorrect. For 9 out of 10 professions it is not true at all.
I don't know how they do things in the UK, but in the US employers want to see proof that you can do what you say you can do or that you are a serious worker when applying for a job. For a lot of industries, it's really hard to demonstrate this when applying for a first job because you have no relevant work experience. A relevant college degree (rightly or wrongly) serves as validation for employers. They feel safer taking a chance on employing you. Even having ANY college degree shows that someone has (theoretically) validated that you can work intelligently.
The problem with not having a degree is that it's very difficult to gain demonstrable domain expertise in most fields without being employed (as you lack access to resources), and most people won't employ you until you can demonstrate some competence, leading to a situation where it's very difficult to get your foot in the door. That's why it's important to have a degree; it gets your foot in the door so you can gain experience. Most people in the US who do not have college degrees or technical certifications are working poorly paid jobs. Most people go to college so that they do not have to do that, not so that they can seek enlightenment.
> It is a filter. Doctors must conform to quite harsh endurance and resourcefulness requirements, and the more such filters applied - the better. This is not a profession for everyone (just like most other professions, really)
Putting someone through a 4 year arbitrary filter is a ridiculous practice which should stop. Unqualified students would wash out during the first year of medical school anyway; that should serve as the filter. Making someone rack up 80-120K in additional student debt just to go through a filtering process is absurd. A friend of mine is currently a resident and has 320K dollars of student loan debt. How is that justifiable?
Most of the so called "universities" are nothing but a cargo cult education. They're only damaging their students. This insanity must stop.
> You can't rule out the majority of the population in a discussion about the nature of higher education just because it doesn't fit your narrative about what college should be.
I can. If the majority is a counterfeit product it can be simply ignored. Only the genuine education matters.
> trying hard because they are deeply passionate about learning is absolutely ridiculous
They're 20 years old. Of course only a minority is passionate about learning. But at least there is a majority who consciously understand the reason they're doing it (and no, the reason is not a degree).
> but in the US employers want to see proof
I thought we're not discussing Mordor in this thread. Mordor experience is irrelevant.
> Putting someone through a 4 year arbitrary filter is a ridiculous practice which should stop
Invent a better filter then.
> Making someone rack up 80-120K in additional student debt
Once again, we're not discussing Mordor here.
Also, the high achievers know how to go out and figure out and do things on their own.
Schools should be free, but seeing how they're not, I see nothing wrong with students demanding their money's worth, and some slack if they fall behind on classwork.
People should read Freakonomics.
They are indeed.
> If you pay half your annual income, you SHOULD expect to get some damn good service for your money.
No. This is a blatant consumerism. It does not matter even a tiny bit how much do you pay - 1/2 of your income, 100x your income, whatever.
> Schools should be free,
Of course, in an ideal world. But we have to deal with what we have and to make sure it's not destroyed beyond any hope.
Do you expect "some damn good service" when you buy a lottery ticket or when you bet all your money on a horse? Will you harass the jokey for not winning that round?
Tuition fees are paid for an access to an infrastructure. That's it. Not for a degree, not for the better grades, not for a "humane" treatment. Just for a chance to learn and nothing else.
> They are indeed.
This is blatant ignorance.
Just because you pay money for something does not mean you can invoke the specter of consumerism and then proceed to shame it. You need water, no doubt about it. Is it evil when you pay for clean water?
What we are really seeing here is market forces that make the current university structure -- with its emphasis on research over quality of teaching -- a terrible product, just like a lottery ticket is a terrible product. Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.
At the moment, the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college is propping up these institutions. But that's going to go away someday.
And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. (And most of the time I did learn that way, better than from lectures.) But I wouldn't have been able to put "MIT graduate" on my resume and I wouldn't have gotten the connections out of it. So that's why I went.
"Who Dares Wins"
Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories.
When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can).
> Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.
Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it.
> the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college
This is a myth. Stop spreading it.
> And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls.
Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there.
> There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own.
It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone.
But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT.
Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.
Yes, but there's such a thing as better odds and worse odds. These students aren't paying for a guaranteed education, but they are paying for an honest effort.
> But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures
Wow! I didn't know I did that! Some of my professors would be truly surprised to hear that.
That's exactly why I said that it worth assessing your abilities first before going there.
> but they are paying for an honest effort
And they're getting it. Slacking the marking because they're now paying more is not an "honest effort", not even close. Honest effort is keeping the bar high enough and pushing them harder and harder.
> Wow! I didn't know I did that!
You (supposedly) did enough of this crap to get your degree. Which is, again, not even close to a point of going to a university.
On the other side the career of many professors depends more on the papers they produce than the students they help. The interests of professors and students are in conflict so a clash of this kind is inevitable.
This is exactly how it works. It's called a "postcode lottery" here.
> Education is as necessary as a public utility
Of course it must be free. But when it's not, you're not paying for a product, you're only paying for a chance to learn.
> actually knowing things about the world
It's 100% a students responsibility to learn. Schools can only provide with an access to an infrastructure (and this is what tuition fees are for) and a little, non-intrusive guidance.
Nobody can force the students to learn anything. Nobody can forcefully stuff the knowledge into them. It just does not work this way, and it does not matter how much you do not like it. It's a direct consequence of the human nature.
And most definitely, a degree is not a "product". It's a luxury to be earned, not something "guaranteed".
Learning can only happen with active studying. Nobody can push the knowledge into your brain. All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.
Actually, the functionality of medical care does depend on the actions of the patient to do what the medical system instructs them to do. When a person doesn't follow doctor's orders, there is a high possibility that the person in need of medical care doesn't actually get the results they expect.
> All you are offered is the chance to learn, and no guarantees of graduating if you turn out to be incompetent at it.
While I agree with your sentiment and the principle of what you're suggesting, most universities aren't packaging it like this. When you see the ads and you read their propaganda... er, I mean their pretty glossy brochures, they are selling it as exactly that: "Come to XU, get a degree in Y, our graduates have a 100% career placement success." "Get a degree in X, the best value in the country, no other University offers our graduation statistics." They might as well be a play by play from the consumer manipulation handbook. So I can't blame students for playing it both ways. I don't think students are stupid at all, I'm sure many of them know that they're not actually buying the degree, but they're all too well versed in how the media is being used to manipulate things to their own ends, and the student playing dumb to that manipulation and using it to their own ends is a classic example of using the University's own tactics against them.
More students means more money.
So it's not just students who feel entitled. There's been a trend for years now of bullshit fill-up-the-hall "academic" courses with limited job prospects which only exist to part students from their cash.
Of course the real picture is more complicated. On the minus side there are expenses, but on the plus side many departments hoover up astonishing sums in national and sometimes corporate research funding.
The bottom line is that universities sweat students and lecturers and researchers for cash, and could afford to be more generous with everyone.