Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

Disclosure: i never went to college, I went to a trade school.<p>Colleges really only started scaring the heck out of me when I started enjoying my career. After spending a day wrenching in a garage, we&#x27;d hit miller time and head down to the Soapbox Bar and Grill. Over the span of a month or two ordering buckets and shooting pool I learned our bartender Javon had a masters in biology and his fiancee Cortisha who bussed the tables had a bachelors in mining science. The both of them came in well below what I earned, had no healthcare and no retirement. I remember having a few too many boilermakers one night and I asked why he was serving grease monkey clowns like us instead of working on flowers. Javon just said theres no work, and the work he would get would pay about as well as a fry cook anyway. He had some massive college bills too and i didnt understand how those worked, but you cant get rid of them like you can a car loan.<p>That scared the hell out of me. You could waste a hundred grand on something I always thought made people into millionaires and still wind up serving suds to a drunk in a blue jumper covered in soot from a runaway 2 stroke who thinks you &quot;invent flowers.&quot; I woke up the next morning with a hangover and anxiety.

I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they&#x27;ve been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it&#x27;s our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself&#x2F;herself?<p>The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren&#x27;t so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let&#x27;s give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we&#x27;ll get back to something sustainable and affordable.

A couple of points: not all colleges are created the same. Many state schools, particularly top-tier ones offer fantastic educations at an excellent price-point. They are a good value, and will remain so. Along with need-based aid and scholarships, they are amazing vehicles to reduce generational inequality (look at UCLA for example). I can only speak to the engineering (not software) side of things, but from lab work to project-based design classes, I gained skills, knowledge and experience from well-trained instructors in a way that I think would be very difficult to begin to replicate in a remote experience.<p>Many, if not most students, can&#x27;t learn effectively by themselves through online videos alone. Structure, assessments and regular interaction with teaching staff have real, measurable value.<p>Finally, the social networks that universities provide students and alumni are valuable. We&#x27;re social beings. These networks open students to possibilities and careers they may not have considered. Of course, there are negatives to this as well.<p>Universities remain economic engines, particularly across wide swaths of semi-rural parts of the country. They create dynamic flows of people, ideas and capital that are undeniably important.

I think it&#x27;s time to decouple education from all of the other things tied to colleges. When I studied abroad in Australia, things like the gym or meal plans were available, but not &quot;bundled in&quot; to your tuition. The idea of tying competitive sports teams to a university would be laughable.<p>We need to remove all of the &quot;excess&quot; stuff from higher education and get back to the core of education and research. Sure, things like football might be net profitable (for some schools), but lacrosse, baseball, swimming, gymnastics and all of that are not and students shouldn&#x27;t be paying for that.

I always found the US model of colleges so outlandishly short-sighted. Problems of non-bankruptcy and wage slavery are just the very apparent outcomes that you would have a system like this.<p>&quot;Free&quot; education is the only thing that separates us from a dystopian society of social immobility. And hence people in US defend it.<p>I came from poor background and the fact that Uni education is free allowed me to, first of all, receive it, and also take risks that I wouldn&#x27;t be able to do if I had to repay a 100k+ loan. These kinds of risks are what in essence allow social class movement, otherwise, we are talking about more comfortable wage-slavery.<p>On the other hand, belief in higher education wanes, people question if degrees like philosophy are &quot;useful&quot; (whatever that means) and then question why voters have no critical thinking to decide their own future.<p>I would love to see if there is historical data supporting my intuitive belief that free access to higher education made significant differences in the advancement of otherwise similar nations. USA is throwing its education down the drain and the decay is already visible.

College isn&#x27;t as appealing as it once was. In order to participate in the economy, we need a well-paying job. We&#x27;re told to get a well-paying job, we need a good degree. To get a good degree, many of us have to go into debt. We finish college with a good degree but are saddled with thousands of dollars of debt (sometimes tens of thousands). And this college debt doesn&#x27;t go away if we go bankrupt. It will always follow us. So, while we&#x27;re trying to pay back our debt for a good degree for a dream to live well in this life, we also have to pay for our housing, to live, to eat, etc. It makes it so hard to save up for a house or anything permanent. Everything always seems precarious because it is. We&#x27;re precarious. What&#x27;s the point of a college degree if we&#x27;re going to be in debt while working after getting the degree? Might as well skip the whole college part.

The fairly recent law that you cannot bankruptcy out of a college load caused all this.<p>- Lenders are willing to lend to anyone knowing they will HAVE to pay.<p>- Colleges over-inflated costs, way beyond inflation<p>- It balanced out to this shit.<p>In the past, colleges had to be careful, and so did lenders, because lots of people just didn&#x27;t go to college due to cost. So they had to sell their worth.

Not all colleges are the same. For example, at the UW-Madison, over half the students leave with do debt at all. There is a Bucky tuition promise so that any low-income person will have college paid for in entirety.<p>All of the negative comments on here treat &quot;college&quot; as if it is one unified thing, when in fact the experiences across institutions (both educationally, as well as financially) are quite different.<p>All of that said, to those who say &quot;free college&quot;: try telling that to a person in the middle of the state, who has never been to Madison, has never had a kid go to Madison, and who has to pay their tax dollars to support the University. It is a hard sell. Sure, it&#x27;d be great if people were willing to support colleges so that they were free. But the taxpayers, by and large, aren&#x27;t.

This is where the continental european model of the university is so much better than the anglo-american one.<p>Universities should be about coursework and research, that&#x27;s it. Dorms, dining halls, gyms, social clubs, sports etc. are not part of the university&#x27;s mission

I would like to see a reckoning for the modern college and university model. They have extremely bloated administrative costs due to the moral hazards of public funding, they have accumulated ideologically biased fields that should never have been legitimized (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;areomagazine.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;areomagazine.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;02&#x2F;academic-grievance-studi...</a>), they are increasingly becoming political monocultures that are hostile to any diversity of thought, and they seem archaic when their primary function these days is not to teach (especially at large, well endowed, research universities) but to certify. That is, people mostly attend college to leverage their names as a proxy for economic value on a resume. Could they largely be replaced with testing centers and more focused vocational schools?<p>All that said, maybe what we need is simply increased competition. Rather than a few, large colleges that absorb lots of students and funding, we need a web of smaller universities that are given greater consideration (and support?) than they are today. However, the current conditions might starve out the smallest colleges or trade schools, and only amplify the hegemony of large colleges.

My kid will be making his college choice in the coming year. As such, he&#x27;s getting mail from colleges pretty much every day. The mailer from Vanderbilt really struck me as to the wrongheaded thinking of university leaders. On one side was this amazing blurb:<p>&quot;Vanderbilt financial aid packages DO NOT INCLUDE LOANS. IT&#x27;S FREE MONEY....65% of Vanderbilt students received some type of FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE&quot;<p>Tell me why college pricing makes shopping for a car look simple, even by pre-internet standards.

There’s this fairly well known idea in organizations that expenses will tend to rise to fill the available budget. It’s not nefarious, just the natural result of a competitive market - both the market inside the organization, where people want to spend any money that is allocated to them (because why not?), and the market outside the organization, where spending (on fancy dorms, maternity wards, or rock climbing inside the office) is an arms race to attract “the best” students, patients, or tech workers (just to name a few examples).<p>Again there’s nothing inherently wrong with this. In tech, especially in the Bay Area, it means a lot of us get to live pretty nice lives as our employers have to invest a lot more of their budgets in attracting and retaining a skilled work force.<p>The problem is when this sort of thing is fueled by subsidies and&#x2F;or opaque mechanisms. Google can afford to lavish it’s workforce from its own profits, but the average startup these days is burning heaps of investor money on “perks” to compete for talent that aren’t truly necessary.<p>But that’s private money, and if&#x2F;when those companies fail, society at large isn’t threatened.<p>When this same phenomenon happens in public institutions like Universities and Hospitals, where the money is coming from individuals who need these services to thrive, the damage is much greater. In the long run, public subsidy for student loans doesn’t make college available to the masses, so much as it balloons the cost and saddles students with debts. In the long run, the US’ Byzantine “insurance” system for health payments doesn’t spread the cost around so much as it inflates and distorts the costs and changes insurance from a “nice to have” to an increasingly expensive barrier to entry.<p>The global pandemic didn’t create the problems these institutions have, it’s just exposing them and accelerating the inevitable failure of the unsustainable. It’s going to leave a lot of damage in its wake.<p>Pessimistically, I expect these institutions to go beg for money from the printer and try to sustain the unsustainable. But my optimistic side sees this as an opportunity for all of us to question the systems around us, and try to fix some of the underlying root causes that made these systems so fragile in the first place.

Once the role of professional college administrator became a thing, then they took over. They&#x27;re paid more than the faculty now. And they run it like a body shop. To pay for their hyperinflated salaries and padded staff.<p>I wish I were being pessimistic about this.

Two accredited online ones that have interestingly sustainable models, and possible interaction with others, I think:<p>BYU Pathway Worldwide and associated programs. It requires a Church affiliation but not necessarily membership (I think). I think tuition is much lower, bachelors programs (like IT, business, others) are available, programs excellent, and is also suitable for those who need to first become qualified for entering a university (edit: i.e., learning English which is used in curriculum, and other basic skill), then provides that university. More info is in Wikipedia and I have gathered a bit of info including linking to a news article that explains it well I think, here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lukecall.net&#x2F;e-9223372036854578440.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lukecall.net&#x2F;e-9223372036854578440.html</a> .<p>And: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wgu.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wgu.edu&#x2F;</a> (also mentioned in wikipedia): state aid available from multiple states it seems (per wkp).

Any time you make money easily available for a certain good, whether through debt or direct subsidy, the cost of that good is going to increase proportional to the amount of money made available. This is what happened in the housing market and with college tuition.<p>I&#x27;d be willing to bet that if you outlawed student loans (assuming that was possible), you&#x27;d see colleges finding all sorts of ways to cut costs without negatively impacting the students.

&quot;Things that can&#x27;t continue forever will stop.&quot;<p>Education wasn&#x27;t on a sustainable course anyway (no pun intended). They couldn&#x27;t keep increasing costs, increasing numbers of students, living off of the work of non-tenure-track instructors who got paid a pittance, and growing the size and cost of the administration. I think that was getting close to the breaking point, even without Covid.

I started looking st going back to school starting around mid last year. I picked up my research again in the past month.<p>All I&#x27;ve done is manage to make myself so much more cynical. Everything I read and learned made it seem like college is nothing more than a pay to play game. I&#x27;m not andti-education or anti-intellectual, but I sure as hell do not support whatever the hell is going on in US higher education. I&#x27;ve been tempted to write aboutit, but my particular circumstances are rather unique and it would just come off as an angry rant.

Tech companies should take the lead on this. Say loud and clear: we no longer ask about education, and no longer take education into account when hiring, starting today. Devalue the sheepskin.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;7H1xu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;7H1xu</a>

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VX8ms" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VX8ms</a>

Shuttered colleges should be turned into hubs for remote knowledge workers. The worst part of remote work is that it&#x27;s hard to build a community without an office; college campuses are designed around community-building, with great shared spaces, gyms, etc. They also tend to be in beautiful places that are reasonably affordable, at least compared to the expensive coastal cities where many knowledge workers live.<p>The current financial precarity of colleges and the massive increase in full-time remote workers have created a very interesting set of pre-conditions. If these conditions persist a while past the distancing phase of the virus, the environment could be uniquely perfect for this shift to take place.

My big prediction for education is that a lot of research universities are going to move large lecture halls online (think chem 101, etc) with labs, seminars, and discussions with lower number of slots to abide with moderate social distancing requirements. It provides the primary educational content of lecture, and provides in person opportunities that students desire.<p>Once we see students and professors like this format compared to either all in person or all online, I think it will stick around. There&#x27;s clearly a need for both improved efficiencies as well as the desire to have real human interaction, and I suspect this Fall we&#x27;ll have the golden opportunity to really experiment with it.

Well, a lot of college programs are just not worth it. The ones that are (engineering) tend to be four years of sleep-deprivation.

I worked at a private college called Expression right at the end of the first dot com bust.The founder wanted to turn the school into the &quot;Julliard of the digital arts&quot; - and keep the tuition as low as possible. For the first few years it was a really interesting and unique place. To make a long story short, the board of directors weeded the main founder out and moved the school through the accreditation hoops so that students could get massive loans. As a result, the school raised the tuition. The place exploded with students for x number of years. When Obama came to office new laws killed off the loans (and the school). Most of the original staff left and the whole thing was sold to a company named SAE. I always wondered what would have happened if they were never able to get accredited and were forced to stay a small trade school. The aftermath is documented in the eastbay express article below (2015). From reading current reviews, the place never recovered.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eastbayexpress.com&#x2F;oakland&#x2F;sound-arts-fading-out-at-expression-college&#x2F;Content?oid=4443620" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eastbayexpress.com&#x2F;oakland&#x2F;sound-arts-fading-out...</a>

Software should be either a trade school or a masters program depending on a student’s level of commitment to the academics involved just like law, medicine, or engineering.<p>The primary problem with education financing is unrealistic expectations. Do some basic math before paying for any education. If an education loan costs you a certain amount plus interests you need to make a certain amount minus what you would earn without the education to qualify that expenditure. If people currently working in your field aren’t making $150k then why would a $100k loan make any sense? Why waste that kind of money? When you could attend a trade school for $10k that allows you to earn $60k. Blaming the system does not excuse bad personal financial decisions.<p>When I was picking schools out of high school I found the third cheapest 4 year university in Texas. It was the only school I applied to more than 20 years ago. A 12 hour semester cost $1800 including dorm, tuition, and meal plan. Books and supplies were extra. To me that price made perfect sense because it would take becoming a CEO to justify the expense.

Colleges, like Intellectual Property, impose artificial scarcity on the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge in an age where the Internet has allowed us all to publish and discuss like never before. They come from a time when we couldn’t record audio and video and disseminate it so easily. Never mind <i>multimedia</i>, they use heavy textbooks!<p>There is a concept called “flipping the classroom”, where people can watch the classroom lectures at home at their own pace, and do the homework together in class. And these lockdowns just go to show that people can carry on learning online. They just need a good coach or course.<p>Lectures are the commodity. Individual attention from tutors and labs is the scarcity.<p>When even rich Hollywood celebs feel they need to bribe colleges for their kids to get in, we know we have artificial scarcity and an old boys network.<p>Flipping the classroom is not enough. Here is what we can do to fix the educational situation: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;magarshak.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=158" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;magarshak.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=158</a>

One of the things I was curious about was how many people are in school now compared to the 60s and 70s. I had trouble finding a graph or statistics on how many people are in school but <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;184272&#x2F;educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;184272&#x2F;educational-attai...</a> shows that 14.6% of men and 10.1% of women in 1971 had completed 4 years of college.<p>For 2019, that was 35.4% of women and about 34% of men.<p>So there are 3 times as many women and 2 times as many men as there were 50 years ago.<p>And that&#x27;s for students who have completed 4 years. I would be surprised if the number of students who started and didn&#x27;t make it to 4 years wasn&#x27;t also 2-3 times higher than it was back then.

This situation is exposing colleges as the scam that they are. Families are getting indebted up to their eyeballs, thinking are paying for education. In reality the education can be had for free. What they are really paying for is a sorting function, something that could also be had for free with national exams.

Good! These aren&#x27;t hard choices - this is the type of prudent spending that happens when you&#x27;re not guaranteed infinite sums of money from the federal government. Scale back on the insanely bloated administrative staff, lavish facilities, sports stadiums, etc.

State schools are still a relative bargain. I attended around 30 years ago and it was about 5000&#x2F;year + 4000 room and board. Tuition now is about 16Kyear and room and board is about 13K&#x2F;year. If tuition is doubling every 20 years, that is about 3.6% growth in cost<p>The average public university is about 10K for tuition today. I think that is attainable for a middle class family.<p>Where things are really out of whack is all the loans to attend private schools. A student has no business going to any private school if they have to take out 50-100K in loans per year.<p>There should be no govt backed loans to private schools and no student loans should be discharged in bankruptcy.

I feel like you can learn quite a bit now with just online material.<p>YouTube and the algorithm have really forced content creators to improve the quality of the content.<p>It&#x27;s going to be tougher for schools to charge 30-50K a year when there are credible alternatives.

I understand that colleges charge the same tuition for online students and in person students, but what&#x27;s preventing the schools from lowering the cost of online, part-time degrees as a way to increase enrollment? They may have hosting costs, or costs associated with platforms like Coursera, but there&#x27;s no cost for facilities which should make them able to cut the tuition. The cost of healthcare and education is far too high in the US. IMO Universal means Affordable, Accessible and Abundant (In addition hopefully high quality as well). Education and Healthcare should meet all of those points.

My sense is it&#x27;s a good idea to separate college as a place where you take classes and can get a degree from college as a lifestyle choice. While living at home and later with a friend, I went to a community college after high school, that my family paid a nominal amount for, and transferred to a UC from there that was entirely covered by Pell&#x2F;Cal grants until graduation. No debt required.<p>Had I gone straight to a 4-year from high school, lived at the school, and made it a lifestyle as opposed to someplace I go to take classes, then I likely would have graduated with a significant amount of debt.

The higher education bubble has been building for a long time. It follows a similar trend to the housing bubble: high prices fueled by loans that are too easy to get and too hard to repay.<p>The current situation is likely going to force a hard reset for the industry. Administrative bloat and other expenses will need to be addressed as colleges get back to basics and focus on delivering education under a more sustainable economic model.<p>A 10% decline in enrollment (much higher is realistic for many colleges) would devastate the finances of most institutions. These will be an interesting next few years.

2 things that I feel hurt US and probably be why we lose to China.<p>1) Predatory college loans (which lead to overpriced education)<p>2) healthcare tied to employers where providers can charge after they provide service months later. Very little transparency and insane markup.<p>Both are very specific to US, and absurd compared to every other wealthy nation.<p>Fixing education and healthcare to be reasonable for lower and middle class would do wonders for this country. Currently millions are in perpetual debt due to medical bills and college loans. They won’t start companies and build great things.

It&#x27;s very interesting how the world comes rotating,<p>In ancient India, Education is considered as sacred and given utmost important.<p>Basic Ideology is that student who have dedicated his life to studies shouldn&#x27;t suffer to learn. So education is free.<p>Basically university&#x27;s are publicly funded and students also do other small works as compensation.<p>For food, students used to go and beg (One needs to stand with a bowl infront of someone&#x27;s house, people will come and feed them).<p>Even though whole culture is destroyed due to colonization. Sadhus&#x2F;Rishis continue to do it even now.

Burn it all to the ground. This model that saddles unknowing students with debt, while locking in old and crusty professors to their cushy jobs for life, is antiquated and needs to go.

Colleges have been peddling shoddy goods to unsophisticated buyers for years with little or no regulation or oversight.<p>In fact, the government has propped them up with federal money, loan guarantees, and a feeder school system that conditions their potential customers and funnels them in the doors.<p>The shoddy goods are degrees that are highly unlikely to be worth what was paid for.<p>You can&#x27;t get more unsophisticated than an 18 year old who&#x27;s been fed a dream about how their life will be awesome if they get into the school of their choice.

I&#x27;m currently adjunct faculty in a software engineering program. I have no expectation of future work beyond the end of this semester as my school has announced massive cutbacks across the board. I&#x27;m &quot;lucky&quot; in that I don&#x27;t rely on this for income but it still sucks. The only good thing is, as far as I know, none of my senior students have lost a job offer as a result of the pandemic.

Oh, so expensive private education is only sustainable in a hyper-inflated economy? That&#x27;s sarcastically unexpected.

I once interviewed for a CD role at a private, vocational certificate college. They do have some IRL locations but primarily online. The director shared that their revenue was about $500m. I didn&#x27;t take the role, and I was left scarred knowing their revenue is someone elses debt and based on hope.

I&#x27;m hoping the crisis will:<p>- Better develop processes for remote education<p>- Bring to light the idea that MOOCs are legitimate<p>- Reduce the shocking amount of waste, privilege to the wealthy, and academic cruft and butt-kissery<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be nice to emerge from all of this with a more level, more accessible, and lower priced collegiate environment?

makes sense: colleges are are entering another recession, and there is already a forecasted drop in enrollment of the wealthiest students, who should have been born during the last recession, that will hit in 2026 and could be as bad as a 15% to 20% drop in enrollment.<p>All in all, this might not be too bad, if you look at the growth in college expenses over the last few decades, the rise in tuition isn&#x27;t going to instruction, it&#x27;s going to administration, and hopefully this downturn will lead to the emergence of mass market cheap credential that are feasible solutions for everyone.

They should outlaw hiring practices with required college degrees for all but the most regulated careers like doctors, lawyers etc.<p>To require a BS or BA for a sales job is insane and just creates servitude dynamics for no reason.

They won&#x27;t be missed. I hope they use this as an opportunity to re-evaluate what exactly they&#x27;re offering to students for the currently astronomical prices inflated by reckless borrowing.

Like many institutions that are failing during this crisis; this is merely accelerating a reckoning that was probably going to happen one way or another.<p>This doesn’t make it good or bad; it just is.

Maybe this is a controversial opinion, but why are parent&#x27;s expected to foot the bill of their children&#x27;s education? When did this become the expectation?

It&#x27;s called being spoon fed versus being responsible.

Isn&#x27;t the real &quot;hard&quot; choice to simply forget about a for-profit educational system and make education a public service instead?

One of the &quot;hard choices&quot; some colleges are making is removing the requirement for SAT or ACT tests for admission. While a case can be made against certain types of standardized tests, will their admission criteria be made more rigorous in other areas to compensate? Lowering the bar for incoming students could end up reducing both the educational experience at the college and eventually its reputation, making them even more desperate for unqualified students in the future, ad infinitum until it gets bailed out or goes bankrupt.

Colleges are addicted to insane tuition pricing (outpacing inflation for 40 years or more), enabled by excessive student loan debt.

I was often told stories from the Boomer generation of people &quot;working their way through college&quot;, holding part time jobs through college to pay for both living expenses and tuition. That is, quite literally, impossible today.

The culture of higher education isn&#x27;t what it used to be. The advancement of knowledge is now secondary to economic growth in a university. Students begin as customers and turn into products by graduation. Universities used to be gatekeepers to better economic opportunities but those opportunities have disappeared. This is a relatively recent phenomenon in that Baby Boomers don&#x27;t have the student loan obligations that generations following them do. Boomers changed the policies to suit their own financial interests, destroying the opportunities that they benefited by for future generations. Massive student loan debt constrains major life decisions and limits access to credit. It&#x27;s a lot easier to navigate life when you don&#x27;t carry inescapable debt burdens. Government refused to limit access to credit and that allowed universities to constantly charge more every year. You can&#x27;t escape student loan debt as you can business loans by declaring bankruptcy because of a fundamentally flawed logic about what the student loan enabled. Higher education is an economic investment. Yet, when the investment fails, the lenders aren&#x27;t exposed to the losses -- the borrowers are. This has been a great deal for lenders as they aren&#x27;t exposed to risk.<p>Unfortunately, neither a Trump nor Biden administration is going to change anything. It&#x27;s up to the free market and entrepreneurs to disrupt this exploitative system.

There are too many short-sighted idiots who don&#x27;t realize that having your neighbors child is the 2nd most important thing to having your own child educated.<p>&quot;But I didn&#x27;t have childen! Why should I pay taxes for schools?&quot; is not uncommon. The answer, of course, is that we all benefit from their education, and so it isn&#x27;t unreasonable for tax money to be spent to help heavily subsidize education.<p>I&#x27;m lucky; I went to college in the early 80s, at a good state school, and it cost about $5000&#x2F;year ($13K&#x2F;year in today&#x27;s dollars). I&#x27;m doubly lucky: my parents paid for it, so I left college penniless but without debt. It sickens me to read how much colleges are charging these days, and how even state schools are modeling themselves after for profit schools. When I went to school, most classes were taught by full time professors, many tenured, aided by TAs. Now there are so many &quot;associate professors&quot;, i.e., getting paid minimal amounts per course hour taught without benefits. The system is rotten.<p>Back in the 70s, Texas was awash taxes from oil money. I knew someone who attended UT Austin back then and it was a few hundred dollars per semester, as the state picked up the rest. Conservatives were conservative back then too, but they saw the value in an educated public. Now they feel like schools should be self funding.

I&#x27;m using Blendle, but can&#x27;t find this story there.

I&#x27;m a developer at a university. We&#x27;re horrified.

no paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msn.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;us&#x2F;coronavirus-pushes-colleges-to-the-breaking-point-forcing-hard-choices-about-education&#x2F;ar-BB13qkTg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.msn.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;news&#x2F;us&#x2F;coronavirus-pushes-college...</a>

There&#x27;s a whole long discussion to be had on the purpose of education, and it goes back a long ways<p>TL;DR: skills vs. reasoning.<p>For oligarchs, especially of public education, it is a skills-manufacturing pipeline for producing an efficient but docile wage-slave workforce.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wage_slavery" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wage_slavery</a><p>For themselves, they reserve critical thinking, un-bowdlerized. Yes, an eponym.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Bowdler" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Thomas_Bowdler</a><p>As Brother Mouzone said in _The Wire_: &quot;You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? N-----r with a _library card_.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invidio.us&#x2F;watch?v=bRCyZydgqdc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;invidio.us&#x2F;watch?v=bRCyZydgqdc</a><p>(Yes, bowdlerized.)<p>It&#x27;s the liberal arts vs. the servile arts. &quot;Liberal&quot; because they are liberating, essential to freepersons. It&#x27;s the undercurrent of virtually all education reform.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Liberal_arts_education" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Liberal_arts_education</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Artes_mechanicae" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Artes_mechanicae</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Education_reform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Education_reform</a><p>Today, higher education is virtiually entirely a credentialing, branding, and gatekeeping mechanism. And like all gatekeepers, the higher-education-industrial complex collects rents.<p>And this goes back a ways. Hardly the first, but: &quot;On the role of Universities and Primary Education as Social Indoctrination: John Stuart Mill via Hans Jensen&quot;, from the 1860s:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6x7u6a&#x2F;on_the_role_of_universities_and_primary_education&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;dredmorbius&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6x7u6a&#x2F;on_the_...</a><p>Mind, a college or university <i>experience</i> can be a hugely transformational thing, most especially if the student transgresses the curriculum. In the mid-1980s I shared a campus with some incredibly capable students (several have appeared in HN stories), granted with many who weren&#x27;t. There were on-campus events, issues, and politics. There were faculty, emeriti, and visiting lecturers who were notable in their fields, including more than a few recognisable names. At least some of whom were patient enough to talk to a clueless undergrad for an hour or so. The arts &amp; lecture series gave access to principle minds and creators. I discovered the on-campus library with a collection in the millions of volumes, part of a multi-campus system numbering in the tens of millions, indexed (though not directly accessible then) via an at-the-time groundbreaking computerised catalogue system -- a preview of DuckDuckGo-like search engines of today. And through the campus computing centre, free use of a shared Unix system, also with multi-campus connectivity, and access not only to such stunning tools as csh, vi, sed, awk, and troff, but email, ftp, and tin.<p>All of this (and more) has shaped who I am, how I think, and what I value today.<p>None of this appears in my (mediocre) grades, transcrpts, or degrees. It was a level of access (gatekeepers, remember) largely otherwise impossible <i>at the time</i>. Today&#x27;s Internet ... makes a significant part of this experience far more generally possible, though there is still a tremendous element of being in the same space with someone, or a group, or access to physical infrastructure, equipment, and environment that online experience can still not match.<p>And the system in which I&#x27;d participated evolved out of a long train of policy decisions, backlashes, many quite political: Thatcher-Reagan conservativism, 1970s eco-awareness and peace movements, 1960s Sputnik-fuelled space-race and nuclear techno-FOMO and -optimism, civil rights, and university expansion, RAND-UCLA Arpanet, 1950s anticommunism, 1940s Vannevar Bush endless frontier government-funded research, early 20th century industrial and energy monopoly funded endowments, late-19th century majors systems, mid-19th century engineering polytechnical schools and land-grant&#x2F;agricultural policies, the Prussian university model, Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedists, the classical university system, liberal &amp; mechanical arts,the Renaissance and emergence of the university, scholasticism, mediaeval and earlier philosp[hical traditions .... Very little of which I had any knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of at the time.

Universities have to do all this proxying for a good education because they are unable to demonstrate the primary value: making you valuable to society.<p>If they did, they could simply publish &quot;Median income distribution for graduating students by degree achieved&quot;. They currently sell a common lie: that there is a roundedness or completeness to education. This is common wisdom and false.