Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The reality is it's really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.
Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they'll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.
I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
“The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students.
Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”
Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"?
I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden.
Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.
> why are all degrees four years?
UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)".
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree?
Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition)
It would be interesting to understand how they set the prices.
Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2 of those personally).
In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was the experience at my public college, as well as that of almost everyone else I talked to.
One semester is designed with a particular set of prerequisites in mind. Most times, one prerequisite holds back every other class on the career path. So, if you don't take that one class that semester, you can only take the elective courses until you take that class. Which means that when you run out of electives, what was supposed to be one semester becomes two, with the only course you qualify for in the second being the one you missed (this isn't necessarily true for the spring semester, since you could take the missing class during the summer.)
This is fine, but it leads to a disparity; taking on more classes than the recommended workload has a pretty linear correlation with decreased time to a degree (though the problem still persists that you don't qualify for your next classes); but taking on less than the recommended often jumps straight to doubling the time needed for a degree, with very little room in-between.
It is largely free if your means are limited. I’m in 4th year of mathematics at Waterloo right now and all but $170 of my $4300 tuition this term was paid for by government grants and bursaries.
Waterloo is actually even more expensive for international students. Some that I know are paying ~$3000 per half credit (5.0 credits per year is the norm) and that’s just in mathematics, not software engineering.
It also depends on the province (most funding is at the province level).
> Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care.
Ohh don't worry, what they don't pay in insurance fees they pay in taxes and fees.
Still, that's a large burden. There are government programs that provide a mix of non-repayable grants and deferred payment loans to people who qualify based on family income. I don't have too much personal experience with them, but I think the intent (and, for the most part, effect) is that economic ability shouldn't be a barrier for attendance.
College costs around the world:https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-college-costs-aroun...
Not saying others are cheap, but just looking at waterloo is probably not represtative.
nailed it
Some engineering programs are a five-year bachelors, due to a requirement to have a 1-year internship. Yet, other universities offer a 5-year BS+MS engineering program.
It's not the same everywhere. Cross the border to Quebec and it's a flat rate (every program is the same).
Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects)
Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
This 100% - you said it better than I did.
It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity.
Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.
If writing well is to do it simply, concisely, and interestingly, then I don't think anyone tried to teach me any useful skills related to writing after eighth grade. I learned more reading "On Writing Well" in a bookstore waiting for my dad to buy a book in my 30s than I learned between 9th grade and the end of my B.S.
I don't remember anyone teaching any classes on how to learn. Would be incredibly surprised if the classics had changed that much since I went to school. There are skills that are useful to learning how to learn like how to use Anki, interweaving, visualization, chunking, etc.. but all of that information comes out of psychology research so I'd be surprised if it was taught in any of the classics.
A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.
This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.
Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.
What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action.
If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does.
CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less.
The current system harms the poor.
As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand.
> Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
In engineering/math, I've seen it swing both ways. Some professors couldn't be bothered to teach, because are so busy w/ their research and/or jaded w/ the University: implicit assumption is to baby the undergrads and shepherd them along the system. In regards to funding in relation to teaching ability, one way to look at it is that a PI is in essence a salesman, you have to sell your vision to get funding/appointments, sell your lab to get good phd candidates, and sell the subject to undergrad as something that is interesting and worthy of learning.
Think of a research group like any other business. You have to create a product and sell it, except the product is publications and publicity.
Related, university presidents are fundraisers first, ie selling their nonprofit to donors, in exchange for buildings, chairs, spots on committees (for poors), fuzzie-wuzzies, etc.
Also anecdata, but I've observed no such correlation. In the sciences I've seen the opposite - that Nobel prize winners (or similar) can be terrible at teaching undergraduates, and even poor mentors for grad students. Some faculty even seem to resent teaching introductory or undergraduate courses. In contrast, I've found many graduate students still remember what it was like to be a beginner trying to learn and understand the material for the first time. (Though not all of them are great lecturers.)
That being said, in CS I've found many Turing award type faculty to be fantastic lecturers (and occasionally acceptable graduate advisors.)
Overall, I'd put my money behind the incentives: at a large research university, tenure is based on 1) research grants, 2) research productivity, publication, and reputation. The university will pay lip service to teaching (both mentoring graduate students and teaching undergraduates) but it is usually a distant third if it is actually considered at all.
It's not a coincidence that the university and faculty will talk about a "teaching load" - i.e. a burden that one is supposed to endure that distracts from the primary goals of fundraising and research.
I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that assertion.
Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for tier 3.
You have clearly never studied Ancient Greek.
I've had the opposite experience.
I suspect a lot of this is because of enormous amounts of risk-free (to the schools) money from the government.
Also, different degrees definitely cost different prices - the cost of an MBA is far higher than the cost of a masters in history, for example.
Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose.
That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
Ya, and the acting students can learn about "compliers" online too. Outside of a garage startup, an engineer is useless if they cannot integrate into a larger team through the spoken and written word. I've run into BS students who haven't read a book since highschool. I've met compsci masters students who still panic if asked to stand up and explain their work to a large group. If a few hours learning about theatre helps solidify your language and presentation abilities, maybe it should be mandatory.
Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.
The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics.
A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.
Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame.
Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
“Typical” might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn’t buy it in the general case.
However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
HackerNews tradition requires that I point out the considerable difference between software developer skills and knowledge of computer science.
Coding experience doesn't give you what a degree in computer science gives you, neither is a degree in computer science a substitute for experience as a developer.
I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality.
This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements.
It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings.
What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.
Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of.
Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that.
I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return.
LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different.
- They cap return to 30k.
- They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year.
- They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).
This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.
Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.
I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.
Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.
Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree.
It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent.
Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids.
Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.
What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?
I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich/talented/dilligent/take your pick).
They don't work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. Oxford/Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.
Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?
A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.
The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.
Also, the idea that a four year degree has a monopoly on making people educated is just incorrect.
If you think it's the best thing for a society to have a well educated citizenry, then I hope you're working to get the government to pay for free college for everyone. The idea that people should have to make enormous personal financial sacrifice for the greater good of society is just bad.
2. People evaluate degrees based on financial outcome simply because there is no other way to justify spending a quarter million dollars on a degree. That is an order of magnitude more than it costs to deliver a high quality education[2].
If college were truly just about learning, you could start cranking out college-educated citizens for $20k a pop. At price it's an easy decision to make. Instead, colleges have become luxury resorts with a classroom as one of the amenities. They compete on things like best food, recreation and nightlife. It's not (necessarily) a problem to bundle education with fun, but you have to justify the expense to your customers. Colleges have chosen to highlight the differences in earnings between those with degrees and those without.
[1] Even worse: While I agree with premise that we should strive for a better educated electorate, someone arguing the opposite could easily point out that the increasing political discord is correlated with the increasing fraction of degree holders.
[2] The cost of the primary input has decreased: Faculty salaries have been stagnant for 40 years--for a given "level". But faculty salaries have actually decreased when you account for "title deflation". Colleges increasingly rely on "adjunct" faculty and delay the promotion from assistant to full professor. It is now common for PhDs to do two or even three post-docs (which can include teaching duties) before getting a first appointment. Thus, a 40 year-old academic today has a lower title and costs less to employ than a 30 year-old academic from the middle of the 20th century.
I read somewhere, but unfortunately can't remember where. That disaffected highly educated people stir up a lot of political trouble - so these things might be related in a causal way (though I'm a little skeptical).
I also wonder how much university just has people exchange one cultural belief system for another based on who is around them rather than learning how to think critically and independently.
My personal experience leads me to think that most people will just start to believe what everyone around them believes, I worry how much I'm affected by this too.
You could argue the world in 1950s was totally different, and today that education is necessary.
Alternatively you could take a view that the world was comparable enough to draw conclusions. But then, 1878 was 'equidistant' to 1950's, as 1950's is to today. That's the year US had witch trials. Lynching was still happening, and continued untill 1960's. Now I am willing to bet that folks here do not want to descend into barbarism, and that education has a huge role to play here.
Hitler had extreme disdain for academics. It's definitively a driving for polarization since it's so easy to draw the line. People who drop out/never enroll have a lot in common with each other and people who graduate have a lot in common with each other but once you compare college educated and high school educated people the overlap starts shrinking.
This is exactly how high-end luxury good markets work.
Selectivity is a status symbol, so you want as many as possible to apply so you can reject as many as possible.
Maybe it would be money well-spent for the public-sector to poach top academics from private intuitions.
It would lead to salary inflation, but might be the most cost effective way to sap prestige and inject into good public universities.
But that’s not even terribly relevant to the average student. An undergraduate won’t benefit from going down the same hallways as the world’s foremost expert on Nigerian guinea pig digestive tracts. But for some reason having studied at the top university (in terms of research, not teaching) matters a lot.
In the end it doesn't make a difference. Employers want to hire good candidates. Hiring is hard and the outcomes asymmetric: very good candidates can give at most 10x performance and for a company with 100+ employees that barely registers, while very bad candidates can create absolutely stunning destruction. So hiring good candidates is a high stakes game. There's lots of noise, any way to get signal out of this noise is valuable. Employers pay big fees to recruiting agencies to get good hires. A reputable university, like Harvard or MIT is like an ideal recruiting agency (and no fees): not only it finds the best candidates for you, it also trains them for 4 years. The 4 years of training function as a further filter as well. In the end, someone graduating for such a college will be quite a sure bet for employers, and so they'll have much, much better prospects in the job market. So they are willing to pay for this. Are they born smart and Harvard does not teach them anything new? Who cares? They'll get much better job offers than if they graduate from Tulane, and that translates in more money in their pockets.
They tend to attract the best teachers. And by "teachers" I do mean the best researchers in the given field. Which in turn attracts the brightest students.
Good researchers are not necessarily good teachers. Good teachers are not necessarily good researchers. But the best teachers in my experience are fiercely interested in their subjects, which they share with the best teachers.
Everybody likes sharing their interests, right?
The point isn't about whether colleges are there for education or not, the point is that if you have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of your life you should get a return on that investment.
The idea that people should go enormously into debt to become educated for the sake of it is crazy. If you want to educate people for the sake of society, then get society to pay for their education. Until then, people need to make rational choices about what for many of them is the biggest financial commitment they'll make.
If it was currently possible to take a group of 18 year olds, and transform them into highly motivated, highly intelligent people, I assume it would exist for sale.
Unfortunately, the construction of a person seems to be highly complex, and is subject to genetics, home life and parental wealth, childhood experiences, peer and other influences, etc.
Until then, humans will continue to use shortcuts for assessing the probability of one's future ability to "succeed" (however one wants to define it), one of which is attaining admittance at certain institutions.
Two things stuck out to me the most:
1) This passage was particularly worrying: "I’m not going to downplay the extent of the problems we’re facing. In addition to the concerns facing Classics specifically and the humanities more widely, there are also enormous and terrifying problems facing higher education in general. Even before the massive disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, these problems already looked insurmountable: on one side the student debt crisis, which has financially crippled an entire generation, and on the other side the increasing precarity of the academic workforce has made teaching Classics (and every other discipline in academia, really) a terrible professional prospect. This is not to mention academia’s endemic problems with classism and sexual harassment."
2) The author/head editor was Donna Zuckerberg. If that name sounds a bit familiar, it's because it is. She is the sister of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people in history. That her assessment of Eidolon's efforts is so dour and bleak, despite her astronomical privilege, should register that there is indeed 'something wrong in Denmark' (the humanities).
The rest of the essay goes into much more depth about what exactly is wrong. But the essence is simple: The Humanities, and the Classics specifically, are Dead.
"Abandon every hope, who enter here."
https://eidolon.pub/my-classics-will-be-intersectional-or-14...
We were teaching kids to read, ethics, morals, long before we had PhDs.
Obsession with normalizing agency to abide fiscal concerns is the real issue here.
Let wealth collapse by refusing to buy into the idea we owe deference to those that hold wealth.
Teach the classics. Write open source.
None of it has to be done for a dollar, or outsized prestige.
I think I'd like some evidence for that.
Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and even Pre-Columbus America had complex cultural customs, art, math, engineering, medicine, language they handed down generationally.
University as we know it is a relic of Medieval European tradition.
The third reason explains why small, residential liberal arts schools carry on semi-successfully for decades (centuries!?) even though they aren't exactly towering champions on the first two metrics.
It's easy to mock the English major from Knox College in downstate Illinois or the psychology major from Prairie View in Texas. But I'll argue that in the Before Times, these schools and their graduates did a lot to hold the social fabric of the United States together. Liberal arts grads do quite nicely in sales, administration, community law practices and more. They've got people skills that some high-earning Stanford grads lack. They take care of one another and provide a strong baseline economy that creates customers for us all.
What's changed is that with the pandemic, we've lost the residential-college benefits of meeting those freshman hallmates turned allies for life. In that case, paying big $$ for what's really just an online education without a valuable network stops having much appeal.
So why bother learning about the basis of human thought and culture when instead we should be learning about how to make the next iPhone app that won't matter in 6 months. Anything to maximize those profits, right? People be damned, it's the bottom line that matters! Got it.
Only around 25% of people have jobs related to their degree. I'd rather be able read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information then learn about algorithms and data structures. STEM degrees do not give you those skills to the same degree.
I can learn CS crap without a degree program. Tech stuff is easy, people are hard. A world full of STEM majors sounds boring as fuck.
Just as some naive first cut at answering this, I looked up GRE scores by intended graduate major [1]. "Physical sciences" (including math) majors average a 151 Verbal and "Humanities and Arts" average a...156, which seems pretty close, and even closer if you squint to try and account for the fact that the physical sciences skews English-as-a-second-language more than the humanities?
Of course, the GRE isn't a perfect proxy for the ability to "read closely, think clearly and critically, and synthesize information", but...graduate schools seem ok with it?
Likewise, your argument doesn't support diverting funds in favor of STEM programs. From my own personal experience of having both a liberal arts BA and a huge portion of a CS degree, the liberal arts program has improved my ability to think and read deeper and more completely than the CS coursework ever could. It has also proven to have prepared me to face the "real world" better than any of my STEM major peers have been able to.
More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
The STEM world has no soul and will fail all of us because of it.
In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my humanities classes. But I doubt either one of our personal anecdotes is all that convincing to a third party.
> More and more, and this thread re-enforces it, I think the STEM vs. humanities argument is veiled misogyny. White boys studying science = good, brown girls studying poetry = bad.
If you're going to jump to this uncharitable a view of my argument, it probably makes sense for us to just stop here.
Yes, the bottom line matters because it's paying for your education. If there is no bottom line you will have no education. Consider this, back in the day only the richest people send their children to colleges and universities. How did they become rich? By maximizing profits. So yes, profits come first, after you have those profits you can spend it on nonessential education.
Educating people in the skills necessary for being good citizens doesn’t cost that much. Most of the books required are free. Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
This is how it is today. The only difference is people are paying $40k+ x 4years to "be educated" but they're not actually learning valuable skills.
> Yet somehow the common response to “college is expensive” is “get rid of it” instead of “make it less expensive.”
We've already tried making it less expensive. Students can get low interest rate loans to attend wherever they'd like – unfortunately that just leads to more colleges, more types of useless degrees, and increased tuition.
What? Giving out easy loans doesn't make something cheaper, it makes something more expensive up to causing a bubble that will crash the rest of economy, like we did with housing in 2008.
It really isn’t that complicated, especially for the single wealthiest country in the history of human civilization.
On the other hand, no-one who is admitted to (say) Harvard is going to be prevented from going by an inability to pay. These top schools are rich enough to fund need-based scholarships.
(source: wife is a professor at an Ivy League school)
I don't know what country you are talking about but at least in the US, we have community colleges which are very cheap and can "educate people in the skills necessary for being good citizens". It is only the worthless degrees from private / for-profit colleges which are a problem.
this one hundred thousand times.
(NB: Talking about in the US)
More and more the Internet makes me feel that the US somehow lost the cold war and it’s now a dystopian nightmare.
Well, the fact that they are third-tier already tells you that they won’t get some cushy job from the education by itself.
Are they necessarily doing it for the love of education? Probably not. But I suspect that that motivation is more likely to be found in them than the students at the top-tier institutions that will be welcomed by the open embrace of six-figure salaries and social status once they graduate.
Beyond that, if schools put a big warning label on their recruiting materials that said "EVEN AFTER YOU SPEND $200K TO ATTEND YOU WILL LIKELY NOT BE ABLE TO FIND A HIGH PAYING JOB" then sure, that would be fine. But that's not what they do. They allude, if only vaguely, to the value of education to one's career. Many people have gone and gotten these useless (financially) degrees because they have misconceptions about what the result will be. As I said, hopefully the market is correcting that issue as people become more aware of what they're getting.
And hey, like I said, there are people who come from rich families or who get full scholarships, and the calculus is different for them. But for everyone else, it's one thing to value education for it's own sake, and it's another to value education at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars (not including the opportunity cost of not working for four years or the interest on the loans to pay those hundreds of thousands of dollars). College is a huge, huge investment of money, and while I definitely value education, I don't think there's a valid argument to be made that any soft education at a low-tier university is worth its price tag.
Medical doctors carefully regulate the number of new doctors to keep wages high. Its difficult to get into med school but when you graduate you'll likely get a medical doctor job.
Public school teachers do not regulate the number of new public school teachers at all, and as such the state U system in my state produces roughly twice as many ed degree holders as there are jobs. Assuming hiring system is perfect (which it is not, LOL) the bottom half of ed grads in my state have to find non educational work. Four years of "show up on time and do what you're told" makes them good waitresses and bartenders in my experience, but on a civilizational basis it seems an incredibly waste of money and talent.
can't wait for college to put out prospectuses that list out all the risk factors in dry and exhaustive detail (eg. https://personal.vanguard.com/pub/Pdf/p3141.pdf#page=4)
Community College classes are MUCH cheaper, and are even more so if you don't take the class for credit (where I went, tuition was $20 for a 1 credit class for non-degree seekers. No that was not a typo, it was Twenty USD for the entire class).
Community College professors don't do research, so they are usually focused much more on teaching classes. I have actually known quite a few professors who are in actual industry and teach a class or two.
I took a Jazz Combo class every semester with a well known local musician. He enjoyed teaching the class because everyone wanted to be there (we were all adult non-degree seekers), and since it was on a weeknight, he wasn't gigging anyways so it was a nice bonus to his freelance work.
CCs are mostly there either for cheap transfer credits, or technical programs for local industry; things like cad/cam, aviation tech, etc.
However, many people are not in your situation. They have to work hard to get a good job and if they pick the wrong degree they will have to work even harder in the future. The education itself is not the problem, it's the unsustainable nature of getting a loan for a degree that does not empower you to pay the loan back.
In terms of education for its own sake, why is Coursera insufficient? Or Youtube? Or, for that matter, book clubs?
EDIT: didn’t see GPs caveat.
The other thing is the networking, I have plenty of former colleagues that own their gig, and plenty others that are CEOs, CTO, COOs
You can't quite match the atmosphere of a late night lab session where you finally get your assignment in a working state, the impromptu conversations, someone pitching his startup idea and showing a demo.
It's like saying that you're discouraging the next lottery winner by telling people that playing the lottery is a bad investment.
I kind of feel it may be a made up field to promote forms of Marxism and not something that actually contributes much to the body of human knowledge. Nothing entirely wrong with that either if it's something a person is into, it's just, well, we might actually be better off with less sociology students. The half baked and non realistic ideas that come out of that cause problems in the real world.
The reason I feel this is not from outside observation but because I spent a bunch of time in sociology classes many years ago. 4 as I recall. I wish I'd spent the time in extra math classes and I believe the world would be better off if people did.
*big caveat for hard sciences of course
Nowadays every single bloke demands free entertainment education without having to work for it.
The number of people going to college to increase their future potential earnings is a far, far larger group.
When evaluating which university to attend, they are choosing to spend an extra $20k+ a year on the school with more luxurious facilities, better departmental marketing, bigger party environment, or slightly higher brand recognition. It's easy to make that decision when you haven't earned that kind of money yet. High-end schools interpret this as a sign of fair sustainable market valuation, and increase their spending on administrators and facilities even more. Other schools follow, desperate to compete. Sky-high tuitions are the result of decades of compounding inflation by subsidy.
https://www2.ed.gov/about/reports/annual/2019report/fsa-repo...
If that's the only metric you base your opinions of education on, then ask yourself this - why learn anything in your life that isn't directly related to your occupation?
So you've got problems on two sides: lots of people getting into debt for no reason on one end, and lots of disaffected pseudo-elites on the other. A recipe for destabilization.
I so completely disagree. College/university is for education. If you want skills go to a trade school and save a truck load of money.
As an example lawyers and doctors don’t gain skills in law/medical school. They are required to slosh through forced internships for that.
CompSci graduates can’t tell the difference because the software industry isn’t mature. In all other professional career paths there is some combination of licenses or certifications. Many of those licenses require college as a prerequisite. It takes substantially more to become a truck driver than it does to be a software developer.
Those really only exist for certain jobs, like plumbers, carpenters, electricians and machinists. I'm not knocking any of those positions - my parents and grandparents are/were machinists - but if you want to be an engineer or scientist, a college degree is required unless you want your resume to go straight to the shredder, or you're taking advantage of having friends and/or family in high positions (i.e. nepotism).
The fact that useful skills are usually only acquired during employment/internship is true. It doesn't change the fact that most can't get employment in the first place without a degree, and internships don't pay the bills.
In addition, since the civil war, colleges in the US have generally been far more focused on utilitarian skills, rather than the humanities. Sure, there were plenty of art colleges still, but there were far more agricultural schools.
Get a graduate degree and then a professional license, such as CISSP. Software developers are just skilled technicians like carpenters and plumbers.
More what? Licenses? License != skills.
A CDL isn't exactly difficult to get. Being healthy and having the ability to see is probably the most difficult aspect. The technical sections contain information that you have to learn or be taught, but it's very high level and most people can learn the material in about a hour or two of study per section.
Right, but what are the minimum requirements to become a software developer? A single 30 minute interview? There aren't any administrative or legal requirements. There is no minimum educational requirement.
Already I think the difference in actual education supplied by elite colleges vs less well-known colleges is vastly exaggerated (most evidence suggests the differences are preexisting, due to students, and that variance is just greater at some schools than others). So the branding thing is somewhat empty and unnecessary. And as for the skill acquisition, I'm more inclined to agree with you there, although I think there's already a dangerous tendency to equate degree with skillset (that is, "you are what your degree is"). Both of these lead to a very stereotyped, one-dimensional perspective on people.
I guess overall I just see this as amplifying inequality trends that are already unjustified, worsening societal problems. There's too much of an all-or-nothing attitude about human beings at the moment, and this just makes it worse by extending it to colleges writ large.
I think there's a lot of unnecessary degree work out there, and think academics is basically broken, but this trend isn't really the best one in my opinion, unless it's ultimately leading to complete collapse, elite colleges and all, and some kind of restructuring. But I don't see that happening. To me it seems like this is just reifying prejudice.
> The Common App’s data does not include community colleges because they typically allow anyone to enroll. But those schools, which often provide low-income students a first step into higher education, also saw steep declines. In the fall of 2020, freshmen enrollment fell by more than 20 percent.
The two trends in the article are a 17% increase in applications for the most selective institutions and a 20% drop for community colleges.
The Times uses weasel words here
>some selective schools saw big increases from students who are typically underrepresented at elite institutions. The University of California, Berkeley, received 38 percent more applications from Black, Latino and Native American hopefuls than in 2019.
Meaning only some selective institutions, the Berklely increase in applications was because they waived the standardized test.
Knowing application patterns this is bad news - it means that poorer people, especially undergrads have not applied this year.
It is unlikely that those same people just turned around and applied to Cornell. I argue that the increase in apps to elite institutions is from people who left the workforce from good jobs. They are making a strategic move to weather the COVID storm and come out on the other side better off.
I don't think this is a good way to go about it because there is still demand for schooling and if the market's answer to bad quality is having schools go under, it just becomes a game of whack-a-mole with new bad schools popping up to fill the gap in supply.
I think a better alternative is having more schools have tuition costs tied to graduate salary similar to how some programming bootcamps take a cut of alumni's pay for X amount of time. Then, at least, there's an incentive for the school to teach something that actually translates to a usable skillset in the real world.
Trades should also be treated as first class citizens. They are good fits for people looking for shorter college diplomas, but they are often stigmatized even though careers like plumbing can pay reasonably well.
I wondered how can one go through 4 years of college majoring in X, and never once google: "starting salaries for major X".
Heck, in the 70s when I went to college, long before google, everyone knew what starting salaries were for the various majors (at the time, Chemical Engineering was the highest paying). Everyone also knew that an Astronomy degree meant unemployment.
I don't think it's a real trend. You only need to apply to one or two safety schools while you can apply to any number of good/reach schools. Those schools have made the admission process much more random. Used to be that your grades + SATs mostly determined who would accept you. Now it's whatever impressed some random admissions drone and who knows what they really want? So you shoot your shot with 40 reaches and hope one of them likes you. If you're a strong candidate you have to apply to more schools in case you get randomly rejected.
While I agree with you and approached my university education with a practical attitude, a lot of people will see universities as providing "Experience": fun, entertainment, open-mindedness, socializing, parties, networks, etc.
Whether any of these practical or experiential goals are most optimally met, in terms of time/life/money/effort expanded, through modern University in 2021, is another worthwhile and heated discussion entirely :)
Isn't this a damning statement on the market that it purely incentivises doings that create monetary value, and puts theose that create other extremely important value in the world (the thirst for knowledge, the study of the arts and history, etc) are either "failing" due to not being profitable endeavours, or only in the grasp of the rich and the select few who get scholarships?
Let’s not even get into the problems associated with education as a commodity.
And (further)… let’s not even get into the effective subsidies that private universities can get through things like tax breaks.
[1] Try to justify that without circular logic.
We need to remove federal student loans for college to finally fail and be taken over by real market demand education.
Your comment embodies the problem. If you expect CS students to have a wide array of specific work experience then you're siphoning experience and not creating any.
Companies should be much more concerned with teaching while building. Most of these students can do the work - they simply need an introduction to the specific special environment that company uses. But those companies refuse. Therefore they don't get workers. It's a self created problem.
It's also in line with basic market economics. Surplus of hiring candidates means you have more leverage.
Another proof is how often big name companies will do diversity hires that are not related to competancy. If there was such demand and competancy required then these would not happen.
High school grads, College Grads, Liberal Arts Grads, Non-STEM Grads, Non-Tech Grads, and now here we are.
They came for the average CS graduates and I did not speak out.
How far do we have to get up the stack to notice we have a problem? Harvard Medical Grads?
I literally couldn't pass French in community college and ended up going to a lesser school because of it. It's just not something I can do, at least in an academic environment.
That's said my life is much better for having attended college. However there's absolutely a max amount of money you should spend on this. Anything more than $40,000 for the full four years is too much. So if you do two years at community college, that's roughly $2,000 a year, 4000. Which leaves a budget of $36,000 for your last two years of college, of course this is just tuition.
That's very much doable, and even if you have to borrow the whole 40 it's not that bad. The real problems start when people spend $100,000 or so attending lowly ranked schools, AKA these for-profit institutions.
Is it possible your community college was just unreasonably difficult?
Yes, infact I took French again at a different community college and passed.
The first community college I went too tried to cram 6 semester units into a single class. This still had the effect of derailing my life as I had to pick a different school to transfer to.
Isn't the requirement to have done a year or two of a second language in high school?
In ether case this isn't easily doable for people who come from unstable homes.
In general, I think it's an ROI thing - the vast majority of non-technical degrees from low-tier schools have abysmal ROI. That said, ROI obviously depends on the I and the R - you intelligently kept the R down, and it sounds like you got a good I, so yeah, no disagreement. I just think you're very much the exception.
Then again I've worked many minimum wage jobs with master degree holders for
Most people people don't realize just how much name recognition matters when sifting through resumes. We get hundreds of applications and it's a fact that candidates from well known schools are selected to advance more often than candidates from obscure schools. School prestige and name recognition acts as a proxy assessment of the candidate. HR just doesn't look into how good the Computer Science program is at "Keene State College". But they do know that if someone went to Princeston or Stanford they must be pretty smart. To be clear, a degree from an obscure university does not disqualify someone, but it does put them at a disadvantage when the applicant pool is large.
I think most people do realize it, which is why we're seeing what's being written about in the article. People realize if you merely want to be educated, you can do that for cheap or free anywhere, but nobody in HR screening resumes cares if you're educated. They care that you have name-brand pedigree. I remember fighting for a candidate who I thought was super smart and could get things done, but he was from a mid-tier State school and not from Stanford and that was the end of it. It's very classist and ugly. If I graduated today from the school I graduated from in the mid-90s, I wouldn't have a job either.
As we all know, this is not just happening in education: All of society is bifurcating into a few winners, and a lot of losers, and a shrinking number in the middle. Everything is has become a slug-fest where the many compete with each other in a high-stakes game for the few viable good opportunities, leaving the rest in ruin.
If HR has anything to do with how engineers are selected there's something wrong with the company.
They are there to schedule interviews and take care of the paperwork.
It really sort of has to work that way. The volume and variance in quality is just overwhelming. There is no way someone technical could look at every resume.
In this case, the HR rep's opinion should have been ignored right away.
Minimize cost, maximize revenue, the difference goes to the pimps: a race with no ending and an evergrowing number of losers.
Wonder when this'll fall apart (if ever). I guess it's a good thing the majority of people worldwide are not exposed to this and therefore potentially get the benefit to observe and learn from it. Take care.
You forgot the key: Split the "losers" roughly 50-50 along some carefully crafted political/ideological lines, and have them fight each other rather than unite and fight the pimps.
You'd be very mistaken if you think there aren't managers out there with the power to do their own hiring. It's not hard.
Most companies are lucky if they can even find someone ranging from competent to excellent for a given role. It's hard enough to do that. And if you land on an excellent candidate, most don't know how to retain them, because it's not economically feasible to do so. They leave, because they're consistently looking to maximize their earnings, or they're smart enough to start their own business.
If you’re trying to buy education the others are overpriced.
If the school isn’t actually good at education then it fails.
True alignment of incentives.
Often when people say this, I've found they're really just using it as a proxy for status or prestige rather than education or critical thinking.
I agree with it in the abstract, but disagree with its use in practice.
A valuation based on immediate financial value turns universities into trade schools (which to be fair, more people need / are really looking for).
And also it would turn universities in to not-very-good trade schools. Why would they train school teachers or social workers when they make so little money?
Metrics change what they observe, unless you are extremely careful, usually for the worse.
At a certain point, the colleges start to look like perfectly price discriminating monopolists: rather than charging the highest price to each customer, they set a maximum price ceiling and then subsidize the gap to the customer's marginal ability to pay.
Going to a “top tier” school can, depending on your financial situation, actually cost you roughly what a state school would. You can argue there are too many hoops to jump through, or anything else, but that’s a different argument.
Boston area schools being "basically free on paper" to middle income families is a reflection of the fact that a student from a ~100k income family has better options for getting ahead in the world than attending these institutions at any cost but these institutions would lose legitimacy without "economic diversity" tokens so they have to reduce the price. Going to Harvard (or similar) if you're not from the kind of people who go to Harvard is a high risk, high reward gamble with years of your life. These schools have to reduce the potential downside in order to get the quality of candidates they want to get from the demographics they want to get them from (i.e. they want to be able to pick the very best people from the "can't afford to attend" demographic). Also it's good PR.
If you're the son of a plumber and your options are going to MIT for CS, or UMaine's "we match your local in-state tuition" deal paired with their crappy CS program the Maine one actually looks attractive because you're going to be surrounded by people a heck of a lot more like you (on a life experiences level), you're not gonna be bottom of your class and you won't be running the Boston rat race when it comes to housing, a part time job, commuting, and all the other "life" stuff". If you're the kind of high-achieving individual who goes to Harvard from a middle class background you're all but guaranteed to live more comfortably than your parents and retire comfortably regardless of the choice you make. Rolling a degree from a lesser state school into a stable job at BigCo isn't something you're worried about. The networking value add from Harvard or MIT isn't as much of a value add because you have no frame of reference for it and won't be making the kinds of life choices where it can be most helpful anyway (remember, no safety net, you're gonna be the one that builds it). So if you're gonna "win" no matter what you choose why add the additional risk of Harvard, MIT or some other program you could wash out of?
I suppose at some point someone has to pay. But you're not rich at $90k. And I just don't see many of those households earning between $90-250k a year wanting to pay for such a privilege.
From my perspective, you've got to be either very rich, or very poor going into those schools, because there's no reasonable room for those in-between unless you're taking out significant life-changing debt to do so.
And after it's all said and done, you're overwhelmingly statistically unlikely to be making so much that the debt didn't even matter.
unless you have a very weird financial situation, no US student is going into anything like that much debt to go to either of those two schools. it looks like you got those numbers by just taking the tuition and multiplying it by four. both schools offer substantial aid packages for eligible families. the average yearly tuition contribution for MIT is something like $17k, not far off from in-state tuition at most public universities.
If your family exceeds the cutoffs for financial aid, but for various reasons cannot provide for college expenses - you are going to go into a lot of debt. One of my friends from the time managed to take 120k for an english major that left them with a $12/hr job at graduation.
I don't know all the ins-and-outs of today's student loan options, but say that 120k is taken at 5% spread across 20(!) years, the monthly payment on that kind of loan is around $800/mo. Did this person not have a clear idea of what recent college grads with English degrees make? I mean, it seems like a serious misjudgment to bury themselves in that much debt without a very clear path out of it.
I'm not suggesting the "learn to code" or "only STEM degrees matter" trope, but if you really want to become a writer, or a teacher, or anything else where an English degree is required, you can get that at a much more affordable price: I know someone from a "poor" family who did exactly that, but went to UMass Dartmouth and now has a successful, average middle-class life as an editor. They did not need to go to six-figure debt because they knew they would have a really hard time paying that off...
Something is really rotten with this country if the only tools to get ahead are a 5% shot at a “better life” (though people seem far too politically correct to provide a counter factual outcome if you don’t get into an elite institution).
Given that everyone was living in Boston post-graduation and the base CoL is somewhere between 40 and 50k per year. The MIT folks had somewhere between 2 and 20x the disposable income at graduation. Meaning their debt burden was much lower.
Umnass opens doors in MA the way smoking pot makes it easier to make friends in college. You instantly have some token thing in common with a sizeable minority of the people around you and that gets you a head start on developing relationships.
But for Boston College, Boston University, or Northeastern? You’re probably going to end up paying more than MIT and get an education that’s indistinguishable from UMass, quite possibly worse in some respects.
What people have been saying in this thread is not incorrect (though should be nuanced): the ivy leagues are worth it for the caliber of the student body and reputation; otherwise, go to a (Tier 1) public school.
Unless, of course, you don’t want to and can easily afford otherwise.
Isn't Northeastern still a big cooperative education school?
I assure you that those of us in engineering know the difference between a student with work experience and one with only academic experience.
Honestly, it sounds like you should transfer to an institution that's a better fit for you.
A Carnegie Mellon degree may help you get more interviews and therefore land your first job if you are struggling otherwise but its likely the person with the Kent State CS degree and the Illinois Urbana Champaign CE degree are not applying for the same jobs right out of school.
After the first few years education becomes less important and actual skills become far more important. Again this is more true at non FANG/SV/Start up type companies. Which is where most engineers will work for the majority of their career.
I'm not saying don't go to school if that's what you want to do, but you can easily get a much better return on your investment if you "buy" some time to work on OSS. That being said, it's a lot harder to do if you have no money since you can't get a government loan to cover your expenses. UBI would be very helpful here.
You're right that it's harder for people who don't have the resources to buy computers and spend time learning/hacking. I've hired several really good devs who only had an HS degree but also had an OSS project, but a lot of people just won't have the resources to make that happen.
Pre-pandemic, going to college away from home offered a fun environment with many amenities. During the pandemic, these fun aspects are greatly limited (and parents might not let kids go anyway, due to health risks). When you take away so much of the fun stuff that goes along with college, it doesn't make as much sense to pay $50k/yr in tuition when the experience isn't that much different than your local state school (which costs $10k).
Top colleges, on the other hand, still offer differentiation in terms of degree prestige. Add onto that the promise of not taking standardized tests into account (as the article notes Cornell and other schools are doing this), and it's not surprising that applications are up.
And given the academic job market, basically any state university should be able to pick and choose among hundreds of highly qualified faculty candidates.
Landing a faculty job at any university - public or private - is an extraordinary achievement.
If I were applying to universities today and had otherwise good credentials but difficulties performing on standardized tests like the SATs, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of remorse for trying to cheat in a rigged system.
I recognize that a lot has been written about the SAT/etc being biased, but high school grades and "experiences" are worse (how does one compare what a "B" in Calculus or club president actually means, in all high schools across the US??).
I may be biased as I did well on standardized tests. I have family members that volunteer to do admissions interviews as alumni of a very major name university. They both mention how gamified some applicants are taking the process, with some high school students' parents essentially buying them research opportunities and other experiences to talk about on their applications. While standardized testing is influenced by family wealth and resources, I'm convinced standardized tests (SAT/ACT/AP/etc) are the least influenced part of college admissions, and thus should remain in some form.
Scott Galloway made a prediction last summer of what colleges and universities will thrive, survive, struggle, or face challenges given the current situation. Basically, the higher ed market will consolidate around more elite schools.
https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1180197139101696013
If he had to make bets on his predictions he’d be bankrupt.
https://www.npr.org/2019/12/16/787909495/fewer-students-are-...
Right or wrong, "top" colleges are considered better equipped to get you close to the wealth and power needed to live comfortably.
This isn't much different from travelers going west and buying claims in search of gold.
Almost the entire collegiate system in the US is fundamentally broken. It is siloed and just as much pay-to-play as the rest of this country. The soaring costs, low returns, and behemoth mis-allocation of resources towards college football are examples of this.
1) poor people probably wouldn't be able to attend
2) it would be substantially more expensive
3) the acceptance rate would be much higher
ideally this would result in schools like UMass Amherst (which ironically is the best public university in Massachusetts - weird considering other states have better state flagships, but that's another issue) being able to compete far more effectively.
why would a smart poor kid ever go to UMass when you could go to Harvard for free? it has never made sense that you get better financial return from say, MIT, even though it costs the same as RandomPrivateU.
The thinking is that conditions would be structured to better ensure the college degree provides suitable income (only for certain majors, only if the college provides certain data about grads, etc).
In addition to low births, student immigration has been severely restricted in recent years by federal policy.
With both factors, the applicant pool is smaller.
Framing this as “rich” vs. “poor” is ridiculous. These “poor” institutions were charging 6 figure sums for a piece of paper. There is nothing beneficial to society by having a lot of unwanted institutions who charge insane amounts that no one wants to go to voluntarily anymore. High Ed needed a shakeout and I’m happy it’s finally happening.
The entire post secondary education system in Germany is focused on specialization in a given field of study (at universities) or vocational training. The advantage here is that there is no financial penalty for choosing the wrong path, only missed opportunity cost due to time spent.
I completed my secondary school in Germany at a typical Gymnasium (the highest tier of the three major secondary school types). Note that my parents did not attend college and aren't wealthy. Around 8th grade my school curriculum exceeded their knowledge. I attended a private liberal arts college in the US as an international student where I relied on (private) scholarships and (private) loans [international students cannot get subsidized loans -- generally interest rates are high and interest accumulates even while enrolled in school].
The only reason why I chose to attend university was because I wanted to gain an advanced understanding of mathematics and I aspired to one day become a college professor (this has since changed of course).
Despite my school being very highly ranked and my hard work producing good academic results it simply did not have the brand reputation to unlock opportunities such as even being invited to phone screens. I had to take a roundabout way to get into my career and instead work my way up from less desirable positions. This focus on brand for academic institution is also something you do not generally find in Germany where the criteria is typically the binary question of whether or not you have a particular degree in a particular subject area (though again the vast majority of jobs do not require a degree).
Too often I observed the candidate with a Bachelor's at ~3.0 GPA from say Stanford being preferred over the candidate with a ~4.0 from a lesser known but equally rigorous institution.
Of course this focus on brand continued beyond college. I quickly learned that a less desirable / impactful role at a top company opens more doors than top positions at unknown companies.
Call me pessimistic, but I do not advise people to attend college in the US unless they can attend schools with a very strong brand and extensive alumni network in their desired professional field.
Looking back at my education my secondary education in Germany was more formative and critical than my college education in the US. While I did have the opportunity to take advanced coursework in college here in the US it did not prepare me for generic jobs not specific to my field of study (and barely even is an asset in my profession). I believe we need to improve high school education in this country and reverse the trend of requiring a college education for the majority of jobs.
The other three metrics (essay, grades, letters of recommendation) can be gamed/cheated. I'm sure standardized testing cheating happens, but it's so much more difficult, even for someone with connections.
Your grades are positively affected if your family can afford tutors for you, or if your parents are educated enough to tutor you themselves. You can have inflated grades that aren't reflective of your actual competency or knowledge. The inverse of this is also true. Bad grades don't provide any obvious information or signal on their own. Poorer students may be assigned to schools that don't have AP classes, so they don't even have the possibility of grade inflation.
You can have people help you write your admissions essay. Hell, you can have other people write it for you altogether. All of the wealth factors that influence GPA also influence your essay, if you actually write it completely by yourself.
Letters of recommendation seem to be the most exclusionary and biased of all. I actually think it's ridiculous that they're still allowed. There is no way to verify that they are true. They're grounded in connections and elitism. How is the average applicant even supposed to compete with letters from a politician, alumni, famous businessperson, or some other type of celebrity? A wealthy student's family can also pay for these in multiple ways, if, for some reason, the connections didn't already exist.
Meanwhile, the argument for tests being biased is that wealthier kids are able to prepare for them more than kids with less resources. But all of the other metrics tie to wealth as well, and every argument against standardized tests also applies to GPA. I'd even say GPA is influenced by wealth more than tests.
You can pirate expensive prep materials. You can PROBABLY find a volunteer tutor if you live in or near a college. But even taking the argument that wealthier children are at an advantage at full value, that advantage is still less than what is provided by the other 3 metrics.
I'm taking this a bit personally since I had an incredibly bad GPA in junior high and high school. I hated doing homework, and I hated sitting in lectures. I failed multiple classes because homework and attendance counted for so much of the total grade, that even 100%ing every quiz and test would still give me less than 60% in the class. The only thing that proved that I wasn't mentally retarded was my performance in course tests and standardized tests.
College went ok. I'm now doing better career-wise and financially than anyone I went to school with, including all of the IB kids who went to top-tier schools (with one exception, there's ONE other person on my level, because they went into finance and they're now an iBanker). I would have been completely screwed without standardized tests as a metric.
I'd be interested in doing an experiment to act like I'm in high school and want all the info on college applications and to see where I end up.
From there I picked: Rice, Rutgers, MIT, Worchester Polytechnic, UMass Amherst, Virginia Polytechnic. Clearly, that was not just one state.
After picking, phone the schools. Ask them to send applications. More applications may arrive by surprise if you do well on the SAT or ACT.
When an application arrives, put it in a typewriter and carefully type into all the fields in the form. Send it by mail, physically, and wait to get mailed a response.
It's almost trivial to chart one's income possibilities based on where you graduate from and what degree you get. The knowledge about how to get into a tech job, or a high finance job, or get into medical school, or get hired by a top legal firm is available to everyone whereas it was limited before to those who knew people who knew these things.
We know what cities and suburbs of those cities will lead to maximal probabilities of "success", we know which schools have the highest achieving kids (or the ones with the richest parents), etc. It saves a lot of time to be able to filter real estate listings by greatschools.org metrics before.
Now I can read about this stuff on reddit and learn the basics of how everything works.
A bright kid with an internet connection can leverage that even if they're in a social network or community that doesn't understand any of these things.
The remaining problem is unknown unknowns. If you don't know what exists, it can be hard to know what to ask. You can't search 'Best X' when you don't know what X is. If you're online though, you may be able to see someone mention it and go from there.
I would argue that the people who succeed at that are pretty bright anyway, but are just applying their skill in an undesired way.