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My experience in higher ed is exactly the opposite. Funding is quite easy to get for STEM research projects through grants and other research programs.

Projects that just "align with political talking points" tend to be much more challenging to fund because there's significantly less money available in those domains.

Economically, an educated populace produces positive externalities on society. As such it makes sense for the government to fund and subsidize it to some extent because it produces a good ROI for both the society and the individuals.

> Economically, an educated populace produces positive externalities on society. As such it makes sense for the government to fund and subsidize it to some extent because it produces a good ROI for both the society and the individuals.

Sure, but we tried that, and tuitions are sky high and everyone is in tons of debt, right? Cutting all public funding may be extreme, but something obviously needs to change.

Then your state may be doing something right, unfortunately here the students are not getting a quality education for the cost. We try but we can't pull $2000 out of our pocket every semester to have group projects or other students programs.

Fun fact with many of the external programs is you are actually paying them to do it. Though it's a "grant" the institution wants you to fundraise to pay them. Yeah, no.

Because of this most students never touch a project outside of classes.

So it seems that your complaint is that certain things are not funded enough at a university. Why is your conclusion then to defund universities entirely? It seems like a non sequitur.

Replace a non-functioning system with a new functioning system.

In other words, the "burn it to the ground and start over" approach.

Burning a system to the ground is almost always the best way to turn a bad system into a worse one. Just like the junior devs impulse to tear out the bad code some other guy wrote and replace it with the differently bad code that they wrote.

Refactor. Don't rebuild. The bigger the system, the more true that is.

People != Code.

Code is logical, people are not. Cultures can only be removed, you will never convince a 40 year old woman working in education their whole life that their entire philosophy is wrong. They will continue to push their beliefs under the table. That's the poison that is naturally bred in public institutions. It's all politically motivated.

Not that I vote for them but you can see how little of a dent Trump made because the institutions around them were actively undoing their work. Perhaps for good reason, however they were voted in by half the population. What we see for support in education is largely confirmation bias. If you put it to a public vote higher education would be defunded.

Think of the whole picture. The why. If you hear how admins and the "inner circle" professors talk you start to pick up on how they run things.

It's a bandwagon culture that believes they have a responsibility to be activists and force that upon students. There is no fixing that by just replacing leadership. The whole boat must go.

>Across the board no more public funding, if it's worthwhile then private industry will fund it like they do for any other trade.

If you think university is solely vocational training, then this makes sense. However, that leaves a lot, including fundamental research unfunded. Research seems to suggest that reductions in public funding is the single most important variable in increases in tuition. I'd be worried that your proposal either exacerbates the problem or creates a whole new set of problems.

Can't increase tuition if there's no public institutions. :).

You can't fix the ship. The political culture is far too ingrained. This makes perfect sense when you realize that public means government controlled and funded. Of course it's going to be largely politically motivated.

As an example there are now new required classes that preach about equality and white privilege with dubious accreditation. Not as a concept, but as a requirement of students. That's a real thing, I wish I were making it up.

Be a fly on the wall in your admins offices and you'll want to scorch earth that system too.

Honestly, how would you propose to generate the political will to just get rid of public institutions? This sounds more like a libertarian pipe dream than a pragmatic solution.

Not all, just the ones we know no longer serve their purpose.

How, though? How would you garner the support to actually make it happen?

So Democrats fund institutions and Republicans want them to go away entirely, is what I'm reading from this.

Not a republican, that thinking is exactly why we are here.

I work at a well known public uni. We can get state and federal funding for anything that aligns with democrat political talking points. We cannot get funding for basic tech and projects.

Uh huh. Totally believe you. Convenient of you to leave out the name of your school while trying to make a ideological point so that nobody can refute your claims.

Apparently your school's tech program must be quite bad, if it's alumni are unwilling to donate to fund student's basic tooling requirements. However, it means your school can't be located in the Pac12 or California.

Across the board no more public funding, if it's worthwhile then private industry will fund it like they do for any other trade.

If you think that publicly funded schools are bad, you should look into how much worse privately funded schools are. (Here's a tip: you won't just be paying for your own tooling. The school will charge you for it at a huge markup.)

Too bad, I don't want to be fired. The tech program is bad, it's bad because there is not funding and instructors are a revolving door due in part to that. We have private industry instructors hire on, look at the state of the institution, and run. The only things that can be even partially funded are classes and dedicated individual student projects. There is 0 budget outside of that.

Alumni don't make enough to be contributing any significant amount of money. Programmers outside of Cali bubble economy are not making that kind of bank.

I'm telling you the facts of what I've personally worked with and how students are being scammed by this system for political gain.

And I'm telling you that if your school was for-profit, it would be even worse.

For-profit schools are significantly worse than non-profit schools in every way. And it seems that your real beef is that the taxpayers have decided not to provide adequate funding to the school for basic supplies. You should take that up with your fellow taxpayers, not the school.

Public schools are for profit, that profit comes out of tax payers against their will. Just because they have a tax free status doesn't mean they're not lining their pockets with money. Given the massive artificial increases in costs - they are. I've seen it happen in realtime.

This doesn't even approach the problem that industry and academics are seperated worlds. Unis lie and tell you everything is "in demand" yet students graduate and no one will even look at them.

The most funding for effective programs comes from private industry. Companies will spend far more than state or federal on real programs as long as they're not attached to universities. That tells you something right off the bat. High schools get far more money than us.

Private industry should be the one footing the bill and are the most knowleable about what industry wants. We do not yet have a system of this so you don't have any examples to base your claim from. For this to happen we need to first remove all higher public education funding to force companies to build their own.

Before you make bogus claims about "general education" there is nothing learned about humanities or general knowledge at a uni that isn't better done with a YouTube video. The instructors don't know how to teach and can't engage students with effective knowledge.

>profit comes out of tax payers against their will.

And there we have it. The "taxation is theft" heuristic that snaps your perspective into focus.

>Private industry should be the one footing the bill and are the most knowleable about what industry wants.

Are there any instances where you think this breaks down? There are some industries that very likely would not exist without initial government support because the initial risk was too great or the payoff too vague. I'm not sure aerospace would exist, for example, without the public shouldering the bulk of the initial risk. (That shouldn't be conflated with the stance those industries can't mature to a point where privatization is better).

Taxation is theft. That's a fact. In some circumstances that's a necessary evil. However that does not make it always proper to do. You're looking for a way to strawman this instead of addressing the argument.

There is little done in modern academics that legitimately drives innovation. Only select institutions, with significant ties to private industry, generate papers and innovation. Largely these are still already done in R&D at a company somewhere.

Public funding for education that works is effectively subsidizing costs for private industry. Public funding that doesnt work is incompetence that benefits no one other then government employees, and that makes it equal to theft.

Therefore, we remove the subsidy, and students that are worth investing in will be paid for by the billions that companies have sitting around collecting dust.

Taxation without representation is theft. If you live in a modern western democratic society, that is not the case.

In my experience, in both academia and industry, industry often gets the better deal. They can effectively socialize the risks to the public sphere and then when there's a clear path to make profits, take the reins. I think that hybrid system tends to work the best to mitigate the evils of both sides.

A good example is SpaceX. There would be no SpaceX without NASA and most of the earliest flights were self-insured by the govt. Their SpaceAct agreement allows them to have access to all the support and expertise of NASA as long as they share their data. In exchange, the dinosaur of NASA has some new innovation led by the private sector. Once they proved themselves competent, their customer base expanded to private companies because the risk was now lower. I don't think any of that was likely to happen in a non-hybrid approach.

You seem to be ideologically opposed to the very idea of public schools, and yet apparently have no problem working for one for years even though there are for-profit private schools or programs that you could be working for.

Something doesn't add up. I'm going to assume you are trolling and leave this conversation now.

>You seem to be ideologically opposed to the very idea of public schools, and yet apparently have no problem working for one

The Ron Swanson Effect

That philosophy right there is why nothing changes. I'm pointing out the problem square in the face and you choose to ignore it for a fantasy. Address the merits, don't strawman.

I can infact get a government paycheck and also criticize it, knowing where it comes from and how it's obtained. Infact that makes me one of the most knowledgeable people on it.

You can, but it does seem to point to some questionable ethics.

Either you are personally benefitting from an institution you are actively undermining or you are perpetuating an organization that you think deserves to go away. Neither of those actions are ethically admirable. (See: your post about how illogical humans are)

Now I'll grant that your personal ethics are distinct from the issue, but I'm sure you can see why that might raise some eyebrows.