I'm being attacked by an evil widget on this page. There is a big-ass Javascript popup, apparently perpetrated by something called "PostRank", that obscures the page on initial load (in Safari 3/Mac). It has a list of posts labeled "Top Posts", none of which are the one I want to read. I can't figure out how to make this thing go away -- there is no close box, and clicking inside it links me away to something else -- and when I scroll the damn thing follows me to make very sure that I never get a glimpse of the actual post. I can't see around it.
Words cannot express how infuriating that widget is. It's like Snap.com only more evil. Banish it back to the nether regions from whence it came and submit this post again so I can actually read it.
UPDATE: Seriously, I can't get rid of it. Clicking inside it, clicking outside it, the Escape key, nasty words about its mother -- nothing works. I even tried following one of its links, and the resulting page had the same obscuring widget on it. Who designs the UI for these things?
I'll try restarting Safari.
FURTHER UPDATE: Nope, it's out of excuses. That is officially the suckiest non-musical widget I've ever seen.
Thanks to everyone who brought this to my attention. The widget should be gone now for everyone.
Somewhat ironically, all of this complaining got the post to the front page of Hacker News. Next time I'll have to do it on the merit of the post, alone.
Yes, there was some problem with that page earlier such that it wouldn't display at all to me. (There was an error message that implied the server was overwhelmed.) Now I see a lot of spammy blog content, which I'm not sure is an improvement, but I did think this part
"Robb claims that as 'there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree' this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble."
Have college costs risen so steeply that there is now no economic rationale (from increased lifetime income) to seek a college degree?
I believe universities will be back to being a haven for those who pursue knowledge for its own sake, and most professional-related credentials will no longer include a "degree."
One of the harbingers of this is the fact that a lot of employers started giving exams to the folks they hire. The 4.0 gpa start not being enough to prove to them that someone was educated enough to do the job (whoa!).
I can envision the day when passing some sort of qualifier will be accepted in lieu of a degree for most professions. How you come by the knowledge to pass that qualifier will be up to you.
The use of universities as a general source of credentials is probably nothing more than inertia from the days when only a select few could attend. There really is no good reason why everyone should get their education from a research institution, especially when they have no intention of going into research.
I suspect that the system is self-destructing right now. The more degrees that universities award, the less it will matter that it came from a university. This will bring about the end of most university education, and hence most universities (because they can't all be doing worthwhile research).
What about qualifications that require specialised equipment or infrastructure? If you need to learn about say chip fabrication or radiology it's not enough to just read about it.
I suppose you could just pay for access to facilities and equipment on demand, but in the case of something like a chemistry lab or x-ray machine the institution granting access has to know your level of competance before they give you access and the easiest way of doing that without checking each time is a structured program.
It could even happen at the universities, if people start attending for classes and programs but not degrees. Some college departments serve multiple masters: a national accreditation organization, which gives the college as a whole accreditation, and some field-specific professional associations which bless the behavior of departments. The professors care primarily about their field-specific status, while the deans worry about the overall stuff. That's part of the reason why you occasionally see a headline that such-and-such univerisity failed to retain accreditation. Often, you can't find a professor willing to take time away from students and research in order to write a report.
After all, they think, if I satisfy the peers in my field, why do I care if I have an acceptable org chart?
I could easily see an employer caring more about getting through a program blessed by a professional organization than about getting an accredited "degree." I actually think this would be a "purification" process for universities.
I think we'd be better off if the qualifier were mandated, regardless of holding a degree and at what GPA.
The metaphor of a degree being a pointer to a body of knowledge fits well here -- I think it was pg who I originally got that metaphor from. I can imagine extending the metaphor to where the degree points to a graph of knowledge, and the GPA is a walk length. No knowledge of which nodes are touched, just how many. Hopefully this metaphor isn't too much of a stretch. :-)
The problem is that the GPA to walk relationship isn't well defined at all, and it still doesn't say what they know, or more importantly how well they think and learn.
The only thing I can really glean from a degree-holder and their GPA is that they were able to learn some body of material at the pace of a college-level course, and were able to retain and work with that information well enough to get the GPA they have. Maybe, depending on how grading is done, and what their grade was based on. It is a very weak indicator even then, but better than using it for determining stored knowledge.
I think it might be better to include as part of the qualifier (in fact, maybe even most of it) a problem they need to learn and apply new things to solve.
I don't. I don't believe that this older group of people known as a faculty whom make up a department really give two shits whether or not their words and methods are really teaching me something or not.
This is a harsh generalization, but unfortunately as much as I don't want to believe it, I've found truer more often than not. Human communication is hard, it's even harder when your terms of agreement is in the form of a syllabus.
I don't mean to undermine some of the finest minds I've ever encountered in real-life, I'm just saying that more often than not, the people who do take it upon themselves to know is hardly worth the modern student's money or time. This is simply proven given what the web has become; I've made more meaningful connections by actively participating in what other people are working than I'll ever make in any formal arrangement for the rest of my life. The problem is in how we reassure ourselves, since we often rely on these tried-and-true techniques that aren't really measuring anything of value other than who originally did it and why. Self-directed learners don't fit into the modern University's model.
In short, I don't believe in universities because I think we don't have a real way to hold these institutions accountable given all the money we give them. I put most of my faith in the people who don't believe in these monolithic institutions and instead believe that there must be a better way.
How you come by the knowledge to pass that qualifier will be up to you.
To a certain extent that's already true of degrees; you can choose not to show up to lectures at all so long as you show up for exams (if there's no coursework obv).
I feel the press is a bit bubble-happy these days, but the scale of the economic depression doesn't make that unmerited. In fact, I welcome it; education costs have gotten more and more out of hand and no one seems to be making a fuss about it except those having to pay. The bubble craze has pointed out areas where things have been going wrong for a very long time, it's sort of like draining a swamp to reveal all the bodies.
I think part of the bubble is an untested assumption, that having a degree will always net you more income in the long run, much like it was assumed that house prices would never, ever, ever fall. It's a core indicator of a bubble, because it's easy for reality to break things if the assumption stops being true. I can definitely vouch for those who have gotten degrees and lead careers that have nothing to do with them; from a career perspective (not a personal or educational one, mind you), a lot of people have just wasted four years of their life.
I was raised by engineers who got degrees to go work in the very specific fields they got degrees in, so of course this flies directly in the face of what I thought was supposed to be the way things work.
"Writer Noel Weyrich compared college administrators to the mafia. "Call it La Alma Mater," he suggested. "Cultivated and well-connected, its kingpins are masters of what amounts to a high-stakes protection racket. 'Nice kid you got there,' goes the shakedown. 'What a shame if he ends up flipping burgers without a degree.' That's an offer most parents can't refuse."
I don't think it is right to think of this as a economic bubble. Degrees are not a straight investment. It differs from place to place, of course. But on the whole, demand isn't that related to real or assumed future income effects.
Even when it is, it is also related to prestige, ideas about what it's like to be a lawyer/engineer/doctor & other things.
It's not unreasonable that the price will outweigh benefits & that people will pay to be a lawyer.
>>from a career perspective (not a personal or educational one, mind you),
I don't think you can isolate those two in the long run.
But all that said, the education world can be turned on it's head. There are more ways to learn things now & there are potentially much, much cheaper ways to provide education. Students subsidising research doesn't make much sense.
I once worked out that for a year of full time study, I was only getting about 5-10 hours of dedicated lecturer/tutor time. That includes some classes with low enrolment & some with massive enrolment & doesn't include preparation or marking.
Students subsidising research doesn't make much sense.
I don't think that is very common: the vast majority of the funding for research comes from the government (e.g. NSF, DARPA, NIH), various non-profits, and corporate sponsorship.
A lot comes from these sources, but often a lot comes from fees. Also funding is not necessarily research grants. It also includes keeping the physical Universities & their bureaucracies going.
In any case, my point was that the fees charged by elite US schools are disproportionate to the cost of providing the education. Even the costs are probably disproportionate to the what costs would be if universities were competing on efficiency/price.
my advisor is charged a significant ~50% overhead on my stipend and a significant percentage overhead on all equipment (e.g. 100k laser systems). This is paid out of NSF grants and it is supposed to cover costs of building maintenance and utilities.
Again, I'm not saying that students are solely carrying the burden of research. There are multiple income sources. But many degree programs are run as revenue generating activities.
But there are a bunch of cross subsidies going on. International/Domestic, Across disciplines, undergraduate/postgraduate. Science students get 3X or more the hours, equipment & materials that sociology or accounting students get. An accounting course (8 courses = 1 year down here) might consist of 2X14 lectures (50-150 students per lecture), 1X12 tutorials(8-15 students) & whatever preparation time is paid (I imagine anywhere from .5 to 2.5 to the hour). Tutors are often only paid in the $20-$30 range. It would not be unusual to average a figure that works out at a small fraction of the cost (or potential cost) to deliver that education.
In general, that hints at a possibility of something flying under the current system & undermining it. All these money machines (eg prestigious MBA programs) could go outside the big institutions. You might say these programs are worthless without the prestige of the institution. Well that's another problem.
The fact that people have a career in an area different from their university degree doesn't mean that they wasted time with education. They just didn't know what they wanted to do, and the education helped despite not being in the field that they ended up working.
A better comparison would be: how many people with college degrees are doing worse than people without them? If you do the math, you will see that very few people without college education are working in the same job as people with degrees.
The main reason for that is that a college degree is a pre-requisite for most well-paying jobs. Which means that people cannot afford not to have a university education, because their prospects will be pretty limited without it.
Indeed. Book knowledge at universities is wonderful, but the value of the social experience cannot be understated. In some sense, one's classmates at a university form a giant fraternity. Stephen Leacock put this quite eloquently in "Oxford as I See It":
"If I were founding a university--and I say it with all the seriousness of which I am capable--I would found first a smoking room; then when I had a little more money in hand I would found a dormitory; then after that, or more probably with it, a decent reading room and a library. After that, if I still had money over that I couldn't use, I would hire a professor and get some text books."
It won't. Lots of people agree with you, and demand for classroom and personal education is not likely to ever go away. Some significant restructuring of the system and how the money flows may be required, though, and a lot of wealth may get lost in the shuffle. (Colleges shutting down, buildings being left to rot, etc.)
I agree that face-to-face interaction between master and apprentice are critical for certain type of skill learning.
However, all memory based knowledge can all go online. Also, video and audio of lectures, homework assignments, etc. Much like MIT opencourse, UC Berkeley webcast.
The education bubble is, in large part, a credit bubble. If you have a resource which has perceived value approaching infinite, competition for the resource, and a government policy subsidizing consumption of the resource (especially via loans), you're naturally going to see the price balloon.
It would be like what happened if you subsidized the speculative investment in assets that people irrationally thought would never decline in price, like, I don't know, homes.
In our capitalist society we have a pyramid shaped distribution of income. For a good portion of history, a college education has meant a place in the top triangle. However, there are only so many spots in that triangle. That is precisely why the cost of a college education will no longer (necessarily) pay for itself in future income. Wages are based on a person's relative skill, and if the whole country has a degree, than it doesn't end up differentiating anyone. Which is why the cost is now seemingly overpriced.
If we really need college degrees for everyone, then there is no choice but to go the high school route and fund it publicly.
One point: If wages are trending downwards, then wages for professors should also trend downwards. This might make tuition trend downwards as well.
(all trends are in real dollars, costs may simply grow slower than inflation)
Other solutions may be a globalization of the educational system. Currently, US institutions are the top. Perhaps that will change, and costs will decrease as suppliers increase.
Salaries for professors are not the main expense in a university. In fact, salaries have increased at a much slower pace then tuition. The whole infrastructure of the university is what is expensive: labs, administration, fitness centers, counseling, etc. Real education is just a small part of the package when a student goes to a university.
Also, tuition is not going to research. Most research is payed by the Government and a few non-profit institutions.
Let us not forget the salaries of administrators. Administrative bloat is a huge problem at many universities, and a large number of these people get higher salaries than tenured professors. Is this personnel overhead necessary? Why can't professors have more of a direct influence on university policy? I suspect many of them would like to run things more collectively, with more attention paid to the students.
The "corporate university" thing makes me sick. No thank you, Mr. CEO President.
The advantage of a college degree is not just salary: the jobs available to college graduates carry better working conditions, hours, and prestige. Evaluations using a net present value calculation are missing the point.
But isn't it the characteristic of efficient markets when prices approach real value and the characteristic of a bubble if you can realize huge arbitrage gains by investing a bit in your education to get a top job? So the bubble the author is bemoaning is already gone and he is just longigng for it to reappear because he used to belong to the winners.
But then I am from the old world where education is a basic right and never understood why people would frame it as a purely economic question...
Foreign Universities (esp. in English speaking countries: Canada, UK, Australia,...) would be the most likely to provide arbitrage and offer the same service at lower costs. It is just fear of living overseas that is stopping this from happening on a large scale now.
Words cannot express how infuriating that widget is. It's like Snap.com only more evil. Banish it back to the nether regions from whence it came and submit this post again so I can actually read it.
UPDATE: Seriously, I can't get rid of it. Clicking inside it, clicking outside it, the Escape key, nasty words about its mother -- nothing works. I even tried following one of its links, and the resulting page had the same obscuring widget on it. Who designs the UI for these things?
I'll try restarting Safari.
FURTHER UPDATE: Nope, it's out of excuses. That is officially the suckiest non-musical widget I've ever seen.