Unpopular opinion: there should be fewer people going to university. The educational inflation has been immense, and many jobs simply do not (fundamentally I mean) require so much. That ought to be ok.
There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.
I'll counter with a different unpopular opinion. Specialized vocational training should be viewed separately from continued cultural education and continued cultural education should be much more accessible. After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen, whether that's decades of medicine training, a year or so of CS training or a few years of trades training - then, for the rest of your life, cultural education programs discussing higher abstract mathematics, philosophy, advanced literacy, political science and other liberal arts, should be available as ongoing pursuits that are ingested ala carte. This is drastically different from our current educational system and the cynics among us will happily point out that implementing something like that overnight would probably just defund education in the current system but I think that'd be a much nicer way to approach life and I think it's reflected in how much continuing education content exists both modern stuff like youtube and more traditional tv shows (including nature shows and things like Cosmos). Modern web based learning (everything from SkillShare which is more vocational to Khan Academy and Harvard's online lectures) are making continuing education more accessible, but we need more! Learning is an activity that should be actively engaged for your entire life!
People like to point at folks working at Mickey D's and opine on how their bachelor's degree is wasted, but if that bachelor's degree came with philosophy courses that taught you self-worth and empathy that helps you raise to a management position that creates a nice working environment for a half a dozen people then I think that is a fine use of education. Learning for learning sake is valuable enough and it doesn't need to be itemized about how much "value" (always framed in terms of vocational training) that it creates for society.
> After you get out of high school you should choose a vocationally oriented educational institution to learn about whatever specialized field you've chosen
I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.
Not a perfect system but the Folkuniversitet in some parts of Sweden provides similar education to what you envision here.
They have both vocational courses (business, economics, IT, healthcare, etc.) as well as courses in humanities, arts (including performing arts, and writing) and so on.
You can take courses whenever you want, or apply for a longer vocational education.
That is giving way too much credit to liberal arts. In theory they might be good, but in practice there is nothing to connect it to reality (if you are a shitty philosopher, you can make your self sound effective; if you are a shitty mathematician, others will point out that your proofs do not work).
If you want me to take the liberal arts seriously, you're going to have to show how they can be held to the same kind of standard that we hold, say, physics to.
Worse, you also simultaneously managed to insult half your audience. I attended a CS only university. I did not have one hour of history class. Not one hour was spent on anthropology, physics or language study except as necessary for our compiler classes.
If you cut out the lesser useful classes, such as anything having to do with user interface design, then maybe you could've gotten a year out of it. That will still have taken me four years, to get that CS degree.
That you throw in higher math as cultural instead of vocational just shows your own biases. I routinely use things I learned doing a PhD in physics in my code because mathematical abstractions really speed things up. Lumping something as useful as group theory with something as trivial as Shakespeare does a disservice to both.
Mao Zedong did something similar to this during the great leap forward. He hoped it would have a similar effect on the peasant rice farmers as you hope for the McDonald's workers.
> there should be fewer people going to university
Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way.
What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them.
Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.
Refining critical thing and awareness of the world only seems necessary due to deficiencies in the public education system. High school is a joke and we should fix that rather than suggest everyone needs to get a collage degree.
> This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become [...] What we need is [...] Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe [...]
For what it's worth, I'm writing from the UK.
A degree ('college') certainly isn't required 'for employment' here, but it's increasingly (over decades) so, or de facto so because so many applicants have a degree having spilled over from not getting the job that was more relevant to (and did require) it.
> What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes
This was the purpose of a University education, and the reason most degrees have a component that is liberal arts even in STEM.
Unfortunately, liberal arts colleges have become indoctrination camps for fringe views rather than honest explorations of all aspects of society. In particular Sociology as a science seems to be to blame for this. Going through school I never felt like I was being indoctrinated in my philosophy courses, but I certainly felt that way taking the mandatory "culture" classes.
If you genuinely put an effort into refining your critical thinking, you should have no problem getting a return on your investment on any publicly subsidized university. Plenty of jobs demand strong critical thinking or writing skills, but don't have require any specialized knowledge that you'd learn in college.
According to the author, people used to go to college to simply get drunk, and implied that this changed, so I view this as a positive change.
College isn’t a requirement for employment in the US. The percentage of people with a college degree in the US ranks about mid pack compared to countries in Europe.
I do suspect that there are cultural differences in how people view those without college degrees in the US. I don’t know about the EU but in the US, people tend to look down on trades, even if they are well paid and skilled jobs.
"Learn a craft to survive and letters to not be stolen from."
You don't want a democratic society lacking or with subpar education. Do you prefer your neighbor voting for the future of the economy, your kids, your long term state goals to be well educated or lacking education. And a lot of populism is based on tricking your constituents with statistics.
But even then: we need skilled workers. Looking 10-20 years ahead, what is the ratio of unskilled/skilled jobs that we need? I would argue the ratio is dropping. And if it isn't, one can always do an unskilled job with a graduate degree. Not so much the other way around. At least if you want to compete globally.
I see your point. But I think doing some back of the envelope in my head it doesn't work in the long run and is bad for the democracy.
The US does have a pricing social issue, but that is not true for the UK from my understanding (outsider, from other part of Europe).
My 2c anyways.
> I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.
Same, although I'd add the caveat that you should be interested in the subject to study this. It's a miserable career for those that pick it for the jobs.
I don't think it's a miserable career for uninterested people. It's a miserable college degree for uninterested people, doing algorithms problem sets and such, but afterwards, you can make money doing mentally unchallenging things, like simple CRUD apps or maintenance of a ghastly complicated in-house software.
> jobs that don’t require a degree credential shouldn’t be able to mandate one
Are these not circular dependencies? Other than the few professions that require degrees by law, this is more of an operational decision than anything.
I think we should normalize the idea that community colleges and remedial education is okay. Had a hard time with Algebra in High School? That's okay, you can take that, and you can work your way up to Differential Equations in the same place! For a fraction of a price of a four year school!
Competence is very much a secondary priority of universities whose primary goal is a demonstration of loyalty.
All college students are double majoring in Ideology, as demonstrated by their ability to conform for four years. This in turn unlocks a host of professions only accessible to Ideology majors: bureaucracies, paper pushers, journalists, NGOs, HR, teachers, etc. The extra patient and above-average smart ones can sit through more college and get better deals in finance, medicine, law, and science (although society is definitely losing out on the most competent people in these fields, because they are constitutionally unable to sit through 8 years of Ideology).
There are very few arenas were raw competence is needed badly enough and results can't be faked, even in the short term, that begrudgingly, people with no Ideology certifications are allowed to operate: engineers are the ones with the highest wealth potential of these. I'd bet that most engineers are successful in spite of college, many would choose to skip it if they could get a do-over, and the best engineers have the lowest opinion of higher education.
We don't need more low skill workers. We need more doctors, more nurses, more medical technicians, we need more plumbers, more electricians, more software developers, more engineers, and more teachers teaching all these things.
In addition to universities sucking more we've also scaled back on training people throughout the economy. Heck, we're running out of pilots for airplanes and there's no plan to train more.
We've got a hungry generation of young adults with desire to do more but society hasn't provided the means for them to succeed. We failed to invest in the future.
”The average American doesn’t care about college or universities at all. They resent education, and they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off ”
> they consider professors a bunch of freeloaders who get summers off
When you go through 4 years for your undergraduate and your professor does the very barest minimum to teach the class, provides no help, defers constantly to their GAs, etc it's hard to not come to this conclusion. While it may not be true in general my experience is not much different than average and I can count the number of actual good, thought provoking, professors I've had on exactly 1 hand.
I understand the point of tenure but the dose makes the poison. Tenure should have a way to be taken under these circumstances. Otherwise, it provides an ivory tower from which a barely capable professor rests their laurels. The result, of course, is a vastly negative view of professors and academia in general.
How many of these jobs will be left in 50 years due to automation? 100? The capital required to automate a lot of these jobs is declining and wages are rising, at some point they're going to intersect.
It seems disingenuous to say, on the one hand, "tech is going to disrupt industries and people just need to deal with it" but on the other hand "education to acquire higher skills should be restricted to the elite few."
I agree. I went to a good school and got a degree that did absolutely nothing for me career wise. Ended up just self teaching myself programming and made a great career as a software engineer for a magnitude cheaper than my college education.
This point is moot. You can think that if you want but it solves in no way the problems as described by OP. In the article, you can basically replace university with school and get the same result (perhaps at a very slightly lower level of gravity). I'm french and just went through education, the situation here is structurally the same. Buildings and furniture is shit; teacher are underpaid and overworked; tons are outright bad (missing field knowledge, missing child psychology understanding, missing basic philosophical concepts about school mission); lower management is under stress and career-oriented, higher management is short-term political and incompetent in the field, in the middle they are borderline corrupted / have mafia-like structure. This whole situation is generalized (one can even look at other public services like health or libraries which are very much taking the same path). So would you say less people should go to high-school? Or less to elementary school? Where do we stop?
Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s).
ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).
It is not an unpopular opinion, it is against the grain. Education is great for countries, but when it becomes a business it is better for the universities than for the country. For politicians, more education is good on paper, any politician that would say otherwise will be called a Nazi and cancelled.
The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.
What actually happened is that politics has changed significantly over the past 20 years.
For one example, go watch the 2000 presidential debate: many social issues were danced around in a delicate manner that certainly is not the case today. And the rhetoric is downright academic compared to the shit throwing that happens these days.
This is a strawman. In fact if you go search for actual leftists that don't just repeat keywords on social media you will find that most agree in some sense with what you just said (in the sense that the political situation is tons of superficiality). You cannot just put the spotlight on your weakest adversaries. This whole situation is because political education is at a general low level and universities are under pressure, hence even the leftists (just like everybody) are fighting hard with shortcuts/groupthink/.. inside their ranks.
ps: it's definitely not unpopular, it's a mainstream media talking point, but that's another story
I just got downvoted hard for that but it’s true. Both political and etiquette teaching. Teaches people what things are currently right and wrong to believe though very strong social pressure.
This entire article is a weird ramble around the central point of "college enrollment has dropped year over year", which, while true, can easily be attributed to students not wanting to pay the same amount of money as before to sit in front of a Zoom screen. Give it a couple of years and the numbers will go back up to normal and this forced "Gen Z doesn't want to go to college" narrative will disappear.
There is also a fast growing collective of students who see how useless an expensive degree can get. They fear the debt that hangs over so many graduates heads.
I do not think this trend will correct post-zoom. I think this is the beginning of a long education winter, at least until the education market can prove actual value instead of certified bullshit printed on $100 bills
I have been hearing this same argument for at least two decades now, yet the numbers never back it up. People may think college degrees are useless but they will still get in line (and in debt) to get one. The only ever big dent in enrollment came because of covid, and it is not (yet) a valid victory lap for all these narratives.
The 'Girls in yoga pants' make even less sense in the title than they do in the article, I'd suggest simply 'The higher education apocalypse' (or perhaps 'collapse' is slightly less sensational).
Actually I read through the whole article and this doesn't really make sense. Most of her article is critical of the institution, then she just throws this in here, like the problem is too many people on their phones, which is rarely her concern before it. Or is she saying the institution requires her to be boring and this is the only one of limited ways she can entertain? I don't get it. I get it in a vacuum, but not in the greater context of the article.
> Professors like me have to fill articles like this with yoga photos to keep people’s attention. And it’s only going to get worse. Our politicians are going to get dumber. Our youth are going to get more restless and desperate. Misinformation is going to get more outlandish. That’s our future, as predicted by the movie Idiocracy.
Does that make sense to you? You read that and think Oh yes obviously, brilliant, why not adorn the article with images of 'girls in yoga pants' given fake names and paper thin characters to explain something completely unrelated to girls (specifically) or yoga 'pants', yes, you have my attention, that makes perfect sense?
The economy actually needs colleges and universities, for purely practical reasons. They’ve been keeping about 15–20 million young adults out of the job market. They suppress unemployment.
If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.
This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.
We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
I didn't read it as a joke. Young adults can be incredibly destructive if left to their own devices.
> The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime.
Elite overproduction produces civil wars. Universities are a way to keep people on the elite treadmill long enough to get past their 20s and stop thinking about revolution.
The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.
I was hoping the author was warming up towards demonstrating how girls in yoga pants, as a sociological phenomenon, predicted the higher education macro, in a Freakonomics sort of way. I've been had
True. But there has been an uptick of stuff here on HN (and maybe in general, but I don't read random blogs much) of articles with dumb, often irrelevant twitter-like reaction gifs splattered throughout.
I guess if I had to pick between the two, I'd take the girls in yoga pants.
I assumed this was going to be about the disconnect between male/female enrollment and about how girls might choose yoga pants to help attract a rare mate.
Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.
So she didn't actually talk to the women in the pictures about this issue, right? Maybe this is related to a running joke on the blog that doesn't make sense out of context?
No, they were labeled as stock photos, and then when you get to the end(which I skipped to) she just says "I had to put girls in yoga pants to keep you reading".
I thought, and still think, it was a fairly lame concept to base an article around
We need to change education, and until we devalue prestigious institutions, this will never change.
I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas.
1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc).
Once Foundations are done, you split out into either..
A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles.
Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations.
B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded.
Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.
The yoga pants thing wasn't necessary. You don't have to show me pretty women for me to care.
I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.
> I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. [...]
Imho this is naive optimism. Surely things are changing and surely things weren't great, but the direction in which things are changing are not for the better. I'm not familiar with the US but around here affordable publicly-funded university that have generally kind of ok quality are going under just the same. Where do you see any kind of non-commercial learning platform building up? I only see edtech. You're talking about copyright which hints at free software movement and the like: we are loosing ground in that field too (or at best it's stable, but it's still completely niche).
I never said anything about platforms. You're misunderstanding me, I'm not talking about replacement institutions, I don't want to have to pay for a power point course and a printable PDF with my name in block letters on it.
I'm glad to see publicly funded institutions go under as well. There should be no gatekeepers to information.
The information you need to get the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available. You want to learn how to do residential electricity? Commercial HVAC? Programming, data analysis, and/or statistics? A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started. About the only things you can't do professionally by just following your interests on the internet right now are medicine and law. I expect that to change too.
Readit News
There's been some good progress in the UK with apprenticeship schemes, and I'd like there to be more of it. (I have, don't regret, and would recommend a degree for my job in software engineering, that's not what I'm talking about.) I think it would be better for the economy; better for innovation, to have more people working sooner where professional qualifications aren't beneficial.
People like to point at folks working at Mickey D's and opine on how their bachelor's degree is wasted, but if that bachelor's degree came with philosophy courses that taught you self-worth and empathy that helps you raise to a management position that creates a nice working environment for a half a dozen people then I think that is a fine use of education. Learning for learning sake is valuable enough and it doesn't need to be itemized about how much "value" (always framed in terms of vocational training) that it creates for society.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a career until I was almost done with graduate school (I have a bachelors in history, a bachelors in linguistics, and a masters in educational psychology - I’ve worked as a professional programmer for nearly 25 years). My kids have gone to college, but they didn’t know what they wanted to do either. My oldest daughter is a semester from graduating and has finally decided what she actually wants to do - in a field wholly divorced from her undergraduate degree. So now she is applying to graduate programs. Frankly, none of my kids college bound friends knew what they wanted to do until they were almost graduated. It seems to me that many of us learn what we want to do by being exposed to many different things in the college environment. But it takes years and sort of floundering to figure that out.
They have both vocational courses (business, economics, IT, healthcare, etc.) as well as courses in humanities, arts (including performing arts, and writing) and so on.
You can take courses whenever you want, or apply for a longer vocational education.
If you want me to take the liberal arts seriously, you're going to have to show how they can be held to the same kind of standard that we hold, say, physics to.
Worse, you also simultaneously managed to insult half your audience. I attended a CS only university. I did not have one hour of history class. Not one hour was spent on anthropology, physics or language study except as necessary for our compiler classes.
If you cut out the lesser useful classes, such as anything having to do with user interface design, then maybe you could've gotten a year out of it. That will still have taken me four years, to get that CS degree.
Mao Zedong did something similar to this during the great leap forward. He hoped it would have a similar effect on the peasant rice farmers as you hope for the McDonald's workers.
Strong disagree. This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become, but it doesn't have to be that way.
What we need is a tertiary education model that seeks to refine critical thinking, awareness of the world, and a funnel into degrees with practical job outcomes - for those that seek them.
Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe, where college isn't a requirement for employment, but a benefit none-the-less.
I did say it was an 'unpopular opinion'!
> This is a rational response to seeing what higher education in the US has become [...] What we need is [...] Other countries have this model, particularly in Europe [...]
For what it's worth, I'm writing from the UK.
A degree ('college') certainly isn't required 'for employment' here, but it's increasingly (over decades) so, or de facto so because so many applicants have a degree having spilled over from not getting the job that was more relevant to (and did require) it.
If anything, European companies are more credentialist when it comes to degrees than their USA equivalents.
The European model is better simply because it's free-to-cheap for the student.
This was the purpose of a University education, and the reason most degrees have a component that is liberal arts even in STEM.
Unfortunately, liberal arts colleges have become indoctrination camps for fringe views rather than honest explorations of all aspects of society. In particular Sociology as a science seems to be to blame for this. Going through school I never felt like I was being indoctrinated in my philosophy courses, but I certainly felt that way taking the mandatory "culture" classes.
According to the author, people used to go to college to simply get drunk, and implied that this changed, so I view this as a positive change.
I do suspect that there are cultural differences in how people view those without college degrees in the US. I don’t know about the EU but in the US, people tend to look down on trades, even if they are well paid and skilled jobs.
"Learn a craft to survive and letters to not be stolen from."
You don't want a democratic society lacking or with subpar education. Do you prefer your neighbor voting for the future of the economy, your kids, your long term state goals to be well educated or lacking education. And a lot of populism is based on tricking your constituents with statistics.
But even then: we need skilled workers. Looking 10-20 years ahead, what is the ratio of unskilled/skilled jobs that we need? I would argue the ratio is dropping. And if it isn't, one can always do an unskilled job with a graduate degree. Not so much the other way around. At least if you want to compete globally.
I see your point. But I think doing some back of the envelope in my head it doesn't work in the long run and is bad for the democracy.
The US does have a pricing social issue, but that is not true for the UK from my understanding (outsider, from other part of Europe). My 2c anyways.
Edit: fixed typos
Same, although I'd add the caveat that you should be interested in the subject to study this. It's a miserable career for those that pick it for the jobs.
Are these not circular dependencies? Other than the few professions that require degrees by law, this is more of an operational decision than anything.
To fix and address the current challenges, the current institutional structure needs to be changed.
All college students are double majoring in Ideology, as demonstrated by their ability to conform for four years. This in turn unlocks a host of professions only accessible to Ideology majors: bureaucracies, paper pushers, journalists, NGOs, HR, teachers, etc. The extra patient and above-average smart ones can sit through more college and get better deals in finance, medicine, law, and science (although society is definitely losing out on the most competent people in these fields, because they are constitutionally unable to sit through 8 years of Ideology).
There are very few arenas were raw competence is needed badly enough and results can't be faked, even in the short term, that begrudgingly, people with no Ideology certifications are allowed to operate: engineers are the ones with the highest wealth potential of these. I'd bet that most engineers are successful in spite of college, many would choose to skip it if they could get a do-over, and the best engineers have the lowest opinion of higher education.
In addition to universities sucking more we've also scaled back on training people throughout the economy. Heck, we're running out of pilots for airplanes and there's no plan to train more.
We've got a hungry generation of young adults with desire to do more but society hasn't provided the means for them to succeed. We failed to invest in the future.
When you go through 4 years for your undergraduate and your professor does the very barest minimum to teach the class, provides no help, defers constantly to their GAs, etc it's hard to not come to this conclusion. While it may not be true in general my experience is not much different than average and I can count the number of actual good, thought provoking, professors I've had on exactly 1 hand.
I understand the point of tenure but the dose makes the poison. Tenure should have a way to be taken under these circumstances. Otherwise, it provides an ivory tower from which a barely capable professor rests their laurels. The result, of course, is a vastly negative view of professors and academia in general.
It seems disingenuous to say, on the one hand, "tech is going to disrupt industries and people just need to deal with it" but on the other hand "education to acquire higher skills should be restricted to the elite few."
Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s).
ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).
The right mix of education is great for everyone, imbalances should be corrected and these days the pendulum is on the side of too many students for a cost that is too high.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-...
What actually happened is that politics has changed significantly over the past 20 years.
For one example, go watch the 2000 presidential debate: many social issues were danced around in a delicate manner that certainly is not the case today. And the rhetoric is downright academic compared to the shit throwing that happens these days.
ps: it's definitely not unpopular, it's a mainstream media talking point, but that's another story
I do not think this trend will correct post-zoom. I think this is the beginning of a long education winter, at least until the education market can prove actual value instead of certified bullshit printed on $100 bills
I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
If nothing else, affordable college was a holding tank for America’s youth. We kept them occupied and entertained.
This fundamentally misunderstands economics. There isn’t a fixed lump of labor that we want to save up for our favorite people.
We don’t want to warehouse adults because it’s doubly destructive. The students are out of the labor market not producing anything and the people babysitting them aren’t producing anything either. That makes us all poorer.
Deleted Comment
> The relationship between aging and criminal activity has been noted since the beginnings of criminology. For example, Adolphe Quetelet (1831/1984) found that the proportion of the population involved in crime tends to peak in adolescence or early adulthood and then decline with age. In contemporary times, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) arrest data (1935–1997), particularly the Crime Index (homicide, robbery, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, auto theft), document the consistency of the age effect on crime.
[1] https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/602...
The USSR largely collapsed because of that. Occupy wall-street was the moment it nearly happened in the US.
EDIT: Downvote me, ya bastages. What can I say, I'm a straight man who appreciates women willing to objectify themselves modestly
Deleted Comment
I guess if I had to pick between the two, I'd take the girls in yoga pants.
I guess it didn’t keep everyone’s attention :(
Instead the yoga pants were completely non sequitur to the article. They are actually the reason I stopped reading the article since it was clearly pointless.
I thought, and still think, it was a fairly lame concept to base an article around
I'd look at breaking it out into 3 separate areas.
1. Foundations (1-2 years). This is a course offered which introduces students to the basics of areas they're interested in. Students can learn about many different areas to study or work in, as well as understand what the requirements of Academia are (essay writing, research, studies, etc).
Once Foundations are done, you split out into either..
A. Apprenticeships, Technical Institutions, Polytechnics: Created by industry leaders, board members are those who have worked in the industry, trainers are those who have worked in the industry recently and are limited to tenures of no more than 2 years - but they get paid more than they would in their roles.
Course length depends on field. For example if you were to become a Software Engineer, probably 18 months is enough. Medicine on the other hand will be more aligned to current expectations.
B. Academia, University: Created by those who want to write and study the field, but not work in it primarily. These will occasionally work with folks in the industry to try new research. These are usually primarily publicly funded.
Right now, the institutions who run and advertise B are the majority - but pretend to operate and work for A. Which is bullshit, but they are incentivized to continue operating that way by the government, by their board and by their own corporate institutions.
I don't care. I'm happy about it actually. We are going through a transformation with regard to our relationship with information. Libraries, copyright, higher learning institutions, $100 text books, professors teaching, your kid getting roughed up by the school resource officer, $60k degrees in English followed by the Starbucks job, smoking in the boys' room, they're all going the way of the dinosaur, and it's very exciting. It's exciting because the gatekeepers are being destroyed, the rent seekers are going hungry, education and information are the same thing, equally accessible to everyone. However, nobody is going to show you your path, chart it for you, not anymore. You can learn anything you want, anything at all, for free, with nobody's permission, but you've got to figure out what to learn by yourself. It is a revolution in self actuation, from now on you'll be what you make of yourself. Of course, it's always been that way, they lied to you when they told you they knew better or that there was a shortcut, but at least it's not a secret anymore. So go out into the world and do whatever the fuck you want, there's never been a better time to do it than now.
Imho this is naive optimism. Surely things are changing and surely things weren't great, but the direction in which things are changing are not for the better. I'm not familiar with the US but around here affordable publicly-funded university that have generally kind of ok quality are going under just the same. Where do you see any kind of non-commercial learning platform building up? I only see edtech. You're talking about copyright which hints at free software movement and the like: we are loosing ground in that field too (or at best it's stable, but it's still completely niche).
I'm glad to see publicly funded institutions go under as well. There should be no gatekeepers to information.
The information you need to get the skills universities claim only they can give you is freely available. You want to learn how to do residential electricity? Commercial HVAC? Programming, data analysis, and/or statistics? A handful of search queries and a ton of reading are all you need to get started. About the only things you can't do professionally by just following your interests on the internet right now are medicine and law. I expect that to change too.