Indeed. I have no sympathy for massive multi-national corporations when executive pay and corporate profits are as high as they are now. The world does not need any more corporate welfare programs.

Haven't you heard? Now universities are supposed to be glorified vocational schools where you pay for the privilege of company training that will be obsolete sometime in the decade after you graduate (but hopefully not before!).

I wonder why big companies like IBM don't just acquire large private universities and offer a traditional 4 year co-op experience.

They could subsidize education and 'guarantee' a job at IBM upon graduation. And shift the curriculum as needed for the company, provided they give a typical core education that you would find at any typical 4 yr college.

Heck if they get a D1 football school they can pump a bunch of money into it and leverage the exposure for advertising.

I did some mentorship at a P-TECH/STEM style academy here in Chicago a few years back when the idea was young. (http://www.goodestemacademy.org/)

About 75-85% of the mentors were in fact from IBM, and the rest of us were from marketing agencies. IBM is very, very highly represented at many of these sites and have enormous skin in the game to propagate the model further. See here: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2017/04/ibm_pre...

Now that IBM has a few years under their belt supporting said academies, and some analytics to determine whether it's benefiting them or not, they're pushing it to the next level.

Why should they? Getting it for free is a pretty sweet deal.

Colleges make a lot of money (the good ones, anyway). And provide a unique source of brand equity.

There are lots of markets that IBM could presumably get into and make money but it's not clear they're all good ideas.

Why would they when they can partner with unis like Marist?

If that's what they're up to, they're doing an absolutely terrible job of it. My primary motivation for going back to school for a Ph.D. was that I kept running into woefully underprepared engineers fresh out of school. They'd never been taught statistics, feared differential equations, didn't understand the physical models used by their fields, and couldn't write a simple data analysis script to save their lives. Some could barely use Excel. To be fair, there were also a lot of perfectly competent engineers, but the incompetent were a shockingly large minority.

I thought, "the academy needs my perspective! They don't understand that they're failing!" Turns out, it's not so much that they don't know as they aggressively don't care. I went to quite a number of "prepare youself to be a professor" talks in grad school at Big State U. Every single one of them presented teaching as a huge time suck and offered strategies for mitigating it. When I tried to explain my motivations to my advisor, he laughed in my face and told me I didn't get it. I finished the Ph.D., but I got the heck out of academia, sadder but wiser.

The academy would be a lot better off trying to do vocational training, because at least then it would be trying to do anything at all to prepare young people for life. You can get a great education at today's university, but nobody cares if you don't.

Have you looked at the curriculum of a CS Degree at a Uni? The first 2 years you're learning about geography and history with a little bit of modern dance and archeology. The last 2 years are barely related to what the industry needs and CS. My son who will be attending in the fall is still wondering why he needs to. His interest lies in Cyber Security and Programming and the curriculum is a joke.

The majority of American Universities are failing. They are becoming irrelevant at an alarming rate unless of course your interested in Modern Dance and Italian Art History.

The basic conception of the university is to give you a well rounded education and not turn you into a savant ignorant of anything not directly related to your major. I don't think that makes it a "joke" in the least.

That's the same old tired argument. So what does that say for folks who don't attend? That they don't have a well rounded education? I don't know what your experience has been or where you work but Uni does not give you a well rounded education and that should not be it's goal.

My degree isn't related to my job. What do you think the university should be, then?

A place to learn about ones interests and to prepare the student with real skills employers need. No course should be forced upon a student unless it is directly related to his/her interest and choice of degree.

Instead they force their version of what you need to know to keep a tenured prof working.

University should start treating students like customers and not like they are doing you a favor.

The days of these backwards and obsolete institutions are numbered. More and more companies don't care if you have a degree because they have realized it proves nothing. They want to know what skills you have and what you have accomplished, not what grade you received in modern dance and Intro to Computers 101.

Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.

> Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.

Yeah, I've noticed, and I think it betrays a wrongheaded conception of what universities ought to be (namely, vocational schools to which companies can outsource employee training on the student's dime). The idea of students as "customers" is also wrongheaded, in my view (although you're far from alone in having it).

Wages are one of the places where simple supply and demand models perform the worst. For a libertarian look at this empirical question, see here:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/09/why_dont_wages.h... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/how_can_there_b....