Brochures are rife with amenities and activities like you're picking out a resort or extended summer camp where you can safely figure out who you are, make friends, and be protected until you're set free, job-pass in hand.
These advertisements are also primarily aimed at the parents.
My SO got a second degree several years ago, and all of her official and financial paperwork was addressed to "the parents of $SO". It was a bit shocking that there's so little expectation by universities for a legal adult to take agency in the process.
I only wonder how much of this process was a result of student demands for more parental oversight and involvement, and if the end result is better outcomes or merely justification of more money spent.
This was already really noticeable when I enrolled in undergrad 12 years ago at a large public university.
I think part of it has been driven by student demand for more parental oversight, but I also think the marketing is what got so many students to take out debt in the first place. So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane.
I also think that the financial system around universities warped in such a way that it became easier to establish direct relationships with parents as university became less affordable to those trying to work while studying. Not to mention the absurd amount of money and effort that universities put into alumni communications to drive giving back to the school.
For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to appreciate that when you have no point of reference. My parents and aunt had this wisdom and, while I was a child, told me "enjoy yourself now, because it will be all downhill from here".
Or doing a PhD.
After that, any non-academic job is super easy.
I don't know where/when those people you mention went to undergrad. When I went, it was brutal and endless. In order to graduate in 4 years, I had to take 18-20 credits per semester. When I wasn't in the classroom, I was in lab, and when I wasn't in lab, I was working on hours and hours of assignments. The professors never coordinated workload, so it all came at once in waves. All the exams were done in the same week, too, so you'd have to frantically cram. EDIT: Then, there was the job hunt during junior and senior years. Resume after resume, application after application, interview after interview. If I actually did any partying, I certainly don't remember it. Those four years were a blur of coursework that I still have nightmares about and am glad are firmly in the past. No job I've ever had in the decades since has come close to the amount of workload I had in university.
School was better. You don't become homeless if you get a D
Being told that as a child really fucked me up, actually. It's a really bad, pernicious idea.
It's analogous to money in politics or insider trading as far as conflicts of interest go. I guess it would help if education was enshrined in our constitutions as a human right, which institutions had fiduciary duties to uphold.
What do you think made the CSU/UC system the most affordable and attractive option in the Country?
The thing you need to accept is that the unfettered administrative bloat was by design, and will always lead to this; the CSU/UC system was essentially tuition-free if you were local and extremely low cost for most of its History because it didn't offer what the others did and we Californians funded that with extremely high local/state/property taxes and our family and by extension our economies were rewarded for it, so we put up with.
It wasn't until the bureaucrats made Industry impose a mandatory University degree for most entry-level jobs well into the 90s that many of those same people migrated to academia and start to shift it to the sordid mess you see today.
Honestly, I say keep in place: let it fall into disrepute crippled by its own malaise once and for all but have legislation in place that it cannot be bailed out when it does. Its the only way I think this has any chance of reform.
Personally, one of the silver linings of the Shutdown in California is showing just how much unnecessary bloat their is in Universities (and in Industry) to deliver on its MVP: accredited completion of courses to issue degrees. If this doesn't disrupt academia and make it shift to a having mainly an online-learning direction for most of its programs then it should rightfully walk into its own demise.
I just registered for a bunch of Coresera and Udemy courses on ML, Sustainability and Supply Chain analytics with accreditation from Industry and University alike for what amounts to what cost less than what I paid for 1 or maybe 2 textbooks while I was in University--that I can complete at my own pace on my terms.
If the goal was to foster an environment for those with the drive to acquire useful skills, then I'd say we already have evolved past the archaic University system and are only forced to be burdened by it solely because of convention.
Apprenticeships are pretty much the backbone of the Germanic countries' Economic and Industrial might, and University is pretty much just an affectation or continued learning component; we need to learn that lesson considering just how much of the US 'education system' is based on Prussian Pedagogy and Ideology.
They don't have "college funds," they have "education funds" because they will always need education, regardless of how it's delivered.
I'm looking forward to a time when that can be used for Coursera, Lynda (LinkedIn Learning), and any other continuing education program. That will be a powerful shift.
And before techies get up in arms about how much of a meritocracy their field is -- survey your FAANG/elite startup coworkers. See what school they went to.
This cannot be true as most Americans do not go to college. Of those that do, most do not do it the "traditional" timeframe of 4 contiguous years after high school.
For example, only 36% of 25-30 year olds have a college degree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
It appears that claim is wrong:
"In October 2018, 69% of 16- to 24-year-olds who graduated high school in 2018 were enrolled, with 9 out of 10 reporting they were full-time students – a marginal increase over 2017 high school graduates, 67% of whom were enrolled in college or university. Over the last decade, that figure has fluctuated between 66% and 70%."
https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-04-...
It is probably worth recognizing that for students who go to college for the experience there is little incentive to graduate.
I think that is the most disheartening thing of all that its become such an accepted and prevalent narrative; from Junior year of High School to to my Junior year of undergrad I had my own business(es), and was involved in professional motorsports (University was always my 'Plan B' if it all went wrong) in some capacity.
My Life was way more fun (albeit stressful and exhausting) outside of University, and almost never within it; I was there to do one thing and one thing only: graduate, and network with professors for lab positions and training to expedite my career as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist. Nothing else mattered to me that took place at school, it was a drain on what I deemed my 'real life,' so I knew I was an anomaly going into this system as Freshman enrollment and orientation had made it clear to me what I had gotten into.
I went to one of the more 'renown' party schools in the US for my upper divisions so I often had embarrassing encounters when turning down persistent invitations to events and parties at school, some possibly even being useful networking events--I mean if you have ever been to an official Red Bull party at an Industry event with an open bar, catering and entertainment and insiders to network and make deals was always going to make some kegger on campus seem monotonous.
Especially if you're there while under 21, as it leaves an impression to say the least.
But, I did notice how prevalent the Health Sciences, which were often really impacted majors at that school, were geared toward admitting non-Californian students, and would bend backwards for International students.
During the good times of the bubble era, I saw it for what it was and didn't mind really it: I was quite open to the cosmopolitan student body.
But it became crystallized how gravely insidious it had become as we started to head into the recession and especially within it as catering to International students was a priority; limited class and lab sections were a common occurrence as the CSU/UC system got hit hard with budget cuts and furloughs, strikes etc...
This all meant that placating to the International students was an even higher priority as so much funding depended on doing so, as keeping them content and within the system was far more profitable than having local students (Californian students) graduate on time who pay 1/7 of the tuition and probably don't participate as much on 'campus life' as they have family and friends outside of it.
I saw time and again as departments were pulling class/lab seats but were filled with predominately International Chinese students in the upper divisions as we had to petition to enter them, and exclusive elective courses: this isn't racist profiling just an observation, my great-grandmother is from Guangzhou, just so its clear.
I still remember my Organic Chemistry lecture that had 100+ seats available, and we were all sitting on the floor, isles, and their were students out the doors trying to petition for a seat. It's embarrassing to recall what it felt like I remember someone from administration coming irate at the fire hazard that it created and her solution being: encouraging those that had 'flexibility in their schedule' to go off campus to the CU 30 miles away and would be admitted (at an undisclosed a higher fee) as the first bailout in 2007 was being proposed that fall semester.
All of this left such a horribly bitter taste in my mouth, I saw the same thing happen with the Korean students at the University where I started where my family still lived and it was a crazy transition. Every time I went to visit there were more Mercedes, BMW, Audi and as the Korean luxury brands got more prevalent Genesis and big Hyundai cars all over that campus as I rode my bike around.
CU Boulder looks like that from the outside, and I'm told from a friend that recently graduated with a BS in Genetics it was the same; he's a local but his freshman year dorm roommate was some Saudi prince's son. I tuned out to the stories he'd say, but the it was practically the same.
So, with that in mind its not surprise to me to see articles like this being common place and finally confirming it, its a big part of what made me lose all value in academia, despite knowing several amazing professors and post docs within. Its realized it was such a rigged system that I had to put scruples and often times dignity off the table to accomplish my goals in a reasonable time frame; this led to a very interesting conversations with an International student in Lichtenstein that led to a collaborative study network I created among my peers.
This article with the USC admissions is also worth a read, as the Admission's officer was profiting from Chinese student admission fraud:
https://laist.com/2020/04/02/usc-cheating-ex-admissions-offi...
I have a hard time seeing how this (college being a great time in your life) is disheartening. For many, it's a time that a combination of
- learning
- meeting new people
- experiencing new things
And for many of them, there's much less stress about how they're going to pay their bills, feed their kids, etc. Those are great things for a LOT of people. If you can, you should enjoy them to the best of your ability.
That you're mentally setting yourself up for be stunted for the rest of your Life is inevitable if you reach your apex by 22 and is incredibly sad; personally speaking, despite that phase of my Life I really didn't know how much more joy I would get out of Life until I turned 26 and saw how my skill set enabled way more opportunities as I got to travel, work and collaborate with People outside my discipline.
Learning the 'Game of Life' via the University lens is what makes the 'academic' trope so astonishingly laughable: making 'safe spaces' a norm has to be the most infantile notion I've ever heard of. What part of Life, outside the perversions of a FAANG like corp where you're pretty much vetted for social regression/immaturity, accommodates that?
And as we saw with all the cancel culture and mob violence mentality that has been created (mainly on University campuses): it is cancerous. If you cannot see a problem with this, then I think you are the Problem.
I'm so glad I got out as that phase of campus life was starting to became the norm.
I got to do all those things during college (exception travel, but I'm not a big fan of travel). I've enjoyed my life since college, in some ways more. But college was a unique, wonderful experience that I remember fondly. Going back to school isn't in the cards for me, but it's certainly the source of the occasional idle thought.
The rest of your discussion seems to veer off on a tangent ranting about current social constructs at colleges. It certainly isn't part of the discussion I was having about how college can be a truly wonderful time in one's life. That has been true for decades, at the least, certainly predating the things you're talking about.
Your POV reflects that, which is very unfortunate, as does your adamant dismissal about my 'tangent' not being relevant to my conclusion of how the priorities of the system have been completely lost; I used it to try and convey a very observable example as it proves that the well can been poisoned by administrative decree, which is in turn aided by those very same who sought to create University into a walled garden experience.
If people are uncomfortable with having their convictions and ideals questioned and placed into scrutiny than something like 'higher education' should be the antithesis of what they are seek and they should be discouraged into such a system--instead they seem to be encouraged to do so all while accruing obscene amounts of un-payable student debt, backed by the State. Further creating an explotable under-class which ultimately amounts to indentured servitude.
But hey, don't let me interfere with the pursuits of all of those luminary Gender Studies majors being awarded PhDs for their exemplary work on the correct use of Gender pronouns of fluid-furries Influencers on Social Media.
Are there no legal issues that could come up with this? Working with financial documents addressed to someone other than yourself?
I briefly touched on this elsewhere in this thread, but as a working professional who happens to still be very young and wanting to get my degree, universities are pissing me off. They create their own definitions of residency and independence that differ from the legal versions that seem to have no purpose but to extract more money from a potential student.
Schools maybe didn't say it as blatantly, but I think that's been a/the selling point since ... you had schools you went away to.
I'm not convinced a huge % of students value outcomes until ... it is time to face them.
If they did I think I'd see a lot different choices by students. That's not recrimination as much as a recognition about how folks make these kinds of decisions / choices.
Rather, parental demands like "we're paying for this, we want to know what's going on"...
And to be fair that position makes sense when parents put up hundreds of thousands of dollars.
By changing the institutions incentives, we've managed to destroy the educational value of the institutions themselves - because we no longer incentivise it.
[1]:https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/grea...
All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate.
But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.
Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. At UK universities, grades are routinely reviewed by an "external examiner" from a separate institution. In my experience, the result of this additional scrutiny has usually be to put grades up rather than lower them.
> Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline.
It is actually done in quite a few places. And even when there is no non-academic alternative, at the very least the examiners could entirely come from a different university than the lecturers.
In Germany there is the concept of "Staatsexamen" where a government-run examination agency recruits examiners from representatives of the profession and academia.
I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.
I didn't know I would be solving problems.
Good that they teach math, but there's a giant disconnect between academia and industry.
How does this work in Canada in regards to professional licensing? In the US, it my understanding that getting an engineering license requires an accredited program and that majority of a reddit programs are 4 year bachelors degrees. Even most master degrees dont have the right accreditation.
In my state, a four year BS degree in an engineering discipline is an automatic accept, although a non-engineering but engineering-related degree is accepted with four years of experience working essentially as a PE's apprentice. And regardless of degree situation, six years of PE apprentice type work qualifies. The criteria are not set by the state gov but by a professional cert board.
So a BS in EE from an ABET approved school is an automatic accept to start stamping civil engineering sewer projects, which seems a little weird as if obtaining a neuroscience degree qualifies one to perform open heart surgery, but whatever. My BS in computer science is "engineering like" enough that a four year apprenticeship under a PE would qualify me, although I didn't pursue that path. My SiL's primary K12 educator degree would qualify her after six years of apprenticeship under a PE, hilariously implying her liberal arts degree counts negative two years toward learning to be a PE, LOL.
I know some PEs and the required written test is reportedly very easy if you recently graduated, virtually impossible the longer you've been focused tightly in one industry. Stealth ageism much like how CS jobs "require" algorithm whiteboarding.
My state is extremely interested in prior felony convictions as a criteria. Not sure why that's relevant in any fashion to PE stamp a civil engineering project. I don't know how common that weird fixation is, this might be doc dropping what state I live in?
Anyway, in summary, there are 49 other states with differing opinions.
If an industry wants its employees to receive a specific kind of training, it should pay for it.
I mostly agree with your cynicism, but this doesn't actually strike me as completely implausible. Phased differently, is it really so astonishing that with 30 years of research and development we can massively improve performance? Once Upon a Time, calculus was a super advanced thing that only the very most advanced students at University could do. Now we have high school students doing it on the regular. Other fields don't usually have the rate of improvement the Computing has, but everybody is making progress.
Same with grades and everything. Once student having it has advantage outside, the school that is more strict will have more students loosing those advantages.
And as for quality of education and knowledge, I honestly don't have a sense that careful knowledgeable thinkers would be favored by typical management.
The total value of any given degree might well go down, but where else are the employers who have always done graduate schemes going to hire people from? Captive market.
Gaming league tables drives almost all management decisions in UK universities, because it so directly affects the bottom line.
That the whole system has become so dependent on foreign funding that this sort of incentive became a financially prudent decision for the unis is terrifying from the point of view of independence [2] and ongoing security of the system.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/26/australian-uni...
[2]: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/universities-rewrite...
Honestly I think airbnb and student housing are scapegoats to an extent, where the bigger problem is a council that tends to oppose new housing they don't control (aka stuff that isn't council flats, which most people don't qualify for), and the political imperative to keep housing expensive means keeping it scarce. Height restrictions in the absolute middle of the city are bizarre, and it's kind of shocking that we still have low-ish density suburban semi-d's next to Grafton Street.
https://goo.gl/maps/MzB5DfXpqCZp9V5V6
Edit: If I may risk a small plug - I was displeased with the UI of Irish housing sites and made www.gaffologist.com to address this.
Good. May they collapse swiftly.
Thats a bit disingenous and hyperbolic. It is true that more apartments are available (00's) due to Corona but the housing crisis is far from over.
It's far more nuanced and complex -- involving tax laws, property dev incentives and planning laws and policy. None of which he mentions.
property dev incentives - airbnb & student housing
planning laws - airbnb & student housing
policy - airbn and student housing
All of these except possibly the first item could directly address airbnb & student housing. I'm not seeing where you 2 disagree.
The thing that pisses me off the most is that the student services usually provide very little guidance to international students about their legal rights in Australia, leading to massive wage exploitation (this is a global problem -- I have friends in the EU -- namely Finland -- and the US that have suffered from this too). Fears over their visas being revoked mean that they are also very unlikely to report abuses by the university or their employers to anyone. I've had to plead with friends to report their employer to Fair Work for outright wage theft, and I know many people who were lied to by their employer into thinking they can work more hours than they can (which was then effectively used as implicit blackmail -- "if you report my abuses, I can get you kicked out of the country"). They didn't know better, because they weren't told by anyone.
And then there's work experience. Many degrees (especially in engineering fields) require practical work experience in order to complete your degree, but employers are incredibly reluctant to give international students unpaid internships (let's not get into the fact that unpaid internships are actually illegal in Australia, except for the specific case of university degrees it seems). My partner has dealt with employers who have explicitly said that they don't accept international students (which is not legal as it is discriminatory), and others have done it more slyly (international students can only work 20 hours a week during semester, so they put on the job description that you must work 21 hours a week). And universities don't help here either, in fact I'm going to name and shame UTS here. At a UTS Career Fair a few years ago, they specified which employers accepted international students and which didn't on the maps (only about a quarter did) and then they gave all of the international students different coloured name badges to local students. The net result was that international students were ignored when they came to any of the "local-only" booths. I don't know if they continued this behaviour, but I sent a complaint about this when I heard about it. Absolutely disgraceful.
Sorry, I just felt the need to rant.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/82sxp9/pay_1000_...
And if anybody is reading this thinking, "whew, I'm sure glad I'm not an international student", this affects everybody. (I mean, you should be outraged anyway but just in case). By normalizing abusive behavior, it creeps up on everyone the same, even if it takes a little bit longer to spread.
One time we did a drone competition sponsored by NASA, in which it was me (Italian), two guys and a girl from Mexico, and one local whose only job was to talk to the corporate types because they wanted to talk to a citizen.
But I think it's fair summary to say that if you are neither a citizen or a permanent resident, you have a damn tough hill to climb [3].
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-can-non-U-S-citizens-work-for-NASA...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...
[3] https://www.inverse.com/article/21487-elon-musk-spacex-forei...
Absolutely not. No company requires a clearance for employment in general, only for specific programs. Also, US Permanent Residents can access unclassified export-controlled information.
(A bit ironic that it took-off after they "hired" that German scientist after WWII - pun intended)
I would argue that this has occurred already; my associates in China assume that many students in Australia cheat their way through their degree, especially the ones who cheated their way into their degree (regarding the English requirements). eg https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-01/chinese-students-paid...
I can't see international travel restrictions to Australia being relaxed until a vaccine is developed, so universities and landlords are going to be in a world of hurt.
Honest question: Australia wants to seriously lock its borders for 18-24 months? And what if a vaccine is not successful (despite tens in development, just two are being currently tested on humans)?
Things change. The situation is extremely dynamic not static. And response will change too.
Germany is already thinking of scaling back its lockdown. So will Australia.
Holidaying sick people will quickly swamp the local small infrastructure as they can't easily be moved away!
As it always turns out, providing food and accomondation for tens of thousands of people is always easier said than done.
The government is not messing around because many previous arrivals who were told to self isolate at home turned out not be self isolating, and most of the infections to date have been traced to overseas arrivals vs local "community transmissions".
Most states have also shut their borders, the only exceptions being NSW and Victoria. E.g., anyone entering South Australia or Tasmania from interstate has to spend the first two weeks in self isolation.
I can see the domestic travel restrictions being eased in a few months, but think the Australian government will be very reluctant to relax international travel restrictions until there is a vaccine.
This blog may be relevant:
Take for example Türk Lisesi schools, run by the terrorist Fetullah Gülen (Fetø for short).
They have managed to steal 10s of billions of dollars from governments around the world through scammy charter programs, while raising two generations of teenagers whose goal it is to overthrow Turkey and implement shariah law.
1/2 of the schools the Turks go to in Melbourne, for example, are Turk Lisesi.
Interesting fact, Gülen, who has asylum in Pennsylvania, is also a friend of America's radicalized christian terrorist secretary of education. There are pictures of her standing side by side at $10k per plate fundraising dinners for Donny.
Greed AND religion are destroying education all around the world.