Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"?
I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden.
Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.
> why are all degrees four years?
UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)".
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree?
Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition)
It would be interesting to understand how they set the prices.
Not just in Canadian universities, I believe it is pretty common and the parent commenter is just not aware.
I went to Georgia Tech, a public school in Atlanta. While the "planned" curriculum is supposed to fit in 4 years, the median is actually around 4.5-5 years. But there are some people who manage to graduate in 3.5 or 3 years (I know 2 of those personally).
In most schools in the US, there is no such thing as "years". You have the classes you need to take to graduate in your program, and it is up to you how to manage that workload. Wanna take 12 credit hours per semester and graduate in 5 years? Sure. Want to take 18-20 hours per semester and graduate in a bit over 3? Absolutely.
Of course some classes have prerequisites and time overlaps, so it isn't 100% freeform, but you can always control the pace at which you graduate. At least that was the experience at my public college, as well as that of almost everyone else I talked to.
One semester is designed with a particular set of prerequisites in mind. Most times, one prerequisite holds back every other class on the career path. So, if you don't take that one class that semester, you can only take the elective courses until you take that class. Which means that when you run out of electives, what was supposed to be one semester becomes two, with the only course you qualify for in the second being the one you missed (this isn't necessarily true for the spring semester, since you could take the missing class during the summer.)
This is fine, but it leads to a disparity; taking on more classes than the recommended workload has a pretty linear correlation with decreased time to a degree (though the problem still persists that you don't qualify for your next classes); but taking on less than the recommended often jumps straight to doubling the time needed for a degree, with very little room in-between.
My personal example: decided to ignore most of the general studies classes I could ignore (aka those that weren't prereqs for any major-related classes, like most social studies) for the first year, did two 14-16 hour semesters for the first year, about 12 hours (each semester) for the second and third year (aka minimum required to be considered full time), took one fall semester off and then did one summer semester instead, and then finished off my last year with two back-to-back 22-24 hour semesters (during which I took a lot of those classes I ignored during my first year).
My school let us do it pretty much free-form, and it was amazing. Taking all the important major-related classes early on let me become knowledgeable enough for internships before a lot of peers (since I ended up taking some important major classes a semester or two ahead instead of taking gen ed classes like a lot of others did at the time), and during my last year I got a bit of a break by taking some of those "general ed" classes that most of my peers took early on.
I love this system, because it allows people to balance it all as they see fit. Some people would like to get all the gen ed classes out of the way first. Some would want to save them for last. Some would like to take them regularly at a "one general ed class per semester" pace. Some people would like to just do 16 credit hours every semester. Some would like to slow down at times and them ramp up heavily at times (which is what I did). Some would like to graduate early, others would like to take their time. Whichever style works for you.
And yeah, we had a general guideline for every major, with every class planned out every semester serving as a "sample workload", but it was just a guideline. Most people followed it to a degree, but not close. Others completely threw it out of the window, because they sorta knew what and how they wanted to do it. I think it is helpful to have for those who don't want to plan out things to their max efficiency and just want to not worry about it. But it isn't something that everyone is forced to abide by, it is more like an advice.
But it wasn't much of a concern at GT, because of the statewide Hope/Zell Miller scholarship covering the tuition based on the credit hours (and not on the actual semesters, you just have to have GPA high enough to qualify, which wasn't that high at all). So if you wanted to speedrun it and risk your GPA, you could do that. But if you wanted to take it slower, that scholarship allowed you to do so, because they paid regardless of how many years you took to graduate, as long as you were full time (with some nuances around part-time that aren't worth getting into right now), had high enough GPA, and you werent over the total cap of credit hours needed to graduate from your program.
While keeping 3.0 at GT might be a fairly difficult task, it is more than doable, and it wouldn't be considered by most GT students as some ungodly achievement. For comparison, the average GPA for fraternity members at Georgia Tech for Spring 2020 was 3.7 (which is higher than the average GT student GPA, but not by some crazy amount, and I think is a pretty good proxy for showing that 3.0 is not something that only a small number of students can achieve).[0]
It is largely free if your means are limited. I’m in 4th year of mathematics at Waterloo right now and all but $170 of my $4300 tuition this term was paid for by government grants and bursaries.
Waterloo is actually even more expensive for international students. Some that I know are paying ~$3000 per half credit (5.0 credits per year is the norm) and that’s just in mathematics, not software engineering.
What 18 year olds have any means at all? Surely everyone passes this means test?
There's the FAFSA[1] required by almost every college. Many private colleges also require the CSS Profile[2] which is far more detailed and intrusive. Many people agree that the colleges do this for maximizing their profit and/or providing an incentive to go where it's "less than sticker".
Some 18 year olds are not on good terms with their parents and can't get their parents to complete the processes. Not sure what happens then but you'd suspect nothing good.
[1] https://studentaid.gov/h/apply-for-aid/fafsa Free Application for Federal Student Aid
I ended up going for pretty close to free after scholarships anyways, though she did joke about consummating the marriage so I guess I missed out on that.
I wonder what happens if your parents are wealthy and you're on good terms with them and not estranged... they just don't happen to want to fund your education.
It also depends on the province (most funding is at the province level).
> Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care.
Ohh don't worry, what they don't pay in insurance fees they pay in taxes and fees.
The US spends a metric ton on medical expenses any way so a qualifier for Canadians like that doesn’t seem right.
You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays for both.
In the German system only the best students are admitted period -- there is no university available for 2/3 of the population. And it only lasts 3 years. You would also be shocked to learn that the US government spends more per capita subsidizing tertiary education than the German government. Except that we also allow non-subsidized students the option of attending at their own cost, so at least they have more options than in the German system, where University education is simply unavailable to them.
Germany is actually a couple of places above the US in the education index (that measures years of schooling): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_Index
Additionally most vocational schools (Fachhochschule) are also free/cheap in Germany and Austria so even those pupils who can't get into university can still get affordable education.
In the US if you have a checkbook and pulse there will be a university that will accept you regardless of your test scores. Not every university, not MIT, but Joe Bob State will take you. Universities even offer remedial education programs so those who are barely literate and innumerate can still enroll, stay longer, and graduate from the university. In Germany you would have been routed out of the system and rerouted to a vocational school, which you are lumping in with a university education by using the vague word "study". "Anyone can study". Well, anyone can study at a library in the US, too, but we are talking about admission to university.
Many of these kids shouldn't go to Uni, and end up taking 5+ years to graduate.
In Germany most of these kids would go to a trade school or apprenticeship.
Still, that's a large burden. There are government programs that provide a mix of non-repayable grants and deferred payment loans to people who qualify based on family income. I don't have too much personal experience with them, but I think the intent (and, for the most part, effect) is that economic ability shouldn't be a barrier for attendance.
College costs around the world:https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-college-costs-aroun...
Not saying others are cheap, but just looking at waterloo is probably not represtative.
nailed it
Some engineering programs are a five-year bachelors, due to a requirement to have a 1-year internship. Yet, other universities offer a 5-year BS+MS engineering program.
It's not the same everywhere. Cross the border to Quebec and it's a flat rate (every program is the same).
Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects)
Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
This 100% - you said it better than I did.
It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity.
Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.
If writing well is to do it simply, concisely, and interestingly, then I don't think anyone tried to teach me any useful skills related to writing after eighth grade. I learned more reading "On Writing Well" in a bookstore waiting for my dad to buy a book in my 30s than I learned between 9th grade and the end of my B.S.
I don't remember anyone teaching any classes on how to learn. Would be incredibly surprised if the classics had changed that much since I went to school. There are skills that are useful to learning how to learn like how to use Anki, interweaving, visualization, chunking, etc.. but all of that information comes out of psychology research so I'd be surprised if it was taught in any of the classics.
A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.
This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree.
Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.
What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action.
If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does.
CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less.
The current system harms the poor.
As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand.
> Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
In engineering/math, I've seen it swing both ways. Some professors couldn't be bothered to teach, because are so busy w/ their research and/or jaded w/ the University: implicit assumption is to baby the undergrads and shepherd them along the system. In regards to funding in relation to teaching ability, one way to look at it is that a PI is in essence a salesman, you have to sell your vision to get funding/appointments, sell your lab to get good phd candidates, and sell the subject to undergrad as something that is interesting and worthy of learning.
Think of a research group like any other business. You have to create a product and sell it, except the product is publications and publicity.
Related, university presidents are fundraisers first, ie selling their nonprofit to donors, in exchange for buildings, chairs, spots on committees (for poors), fuzzie-wuzzies, etc.
Also anecdata, but I've observed no such correlation. In the sciences I've seen the opposite - that Nobel prize winners (or similar) can be terrible at teaching undergraduates, and even poor mentors for grad students. Some faculty even seem to resent teaching introductory or undergraduate courses. In contrast, I've found many graduate students still remember what it was like to be a beginner trying to learn and understand the material for the first time. (Though not all of them are great lecturers.)
That being said, in CS I've found many Turing award type faculty to be fantastic lecturers (and occasionally acceptable graduate advisors.)
Overall, I'd put my money behind the incentives: at a large research university, tenure is based on 1) research grants, 2) research productivity, publication, and reputation. The university will pay lip service to teaching (both mentoring graduate students and teaching undergraduates) but it is usually a distant third if it is actually considered at all.
It's not a coincidence that the university and faculty will talk about a "teaching load" - i.e. a burden that one is supposed to endure that distracts from the primary goals of fundraising and research.
I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option.
> Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that assertion.
It's almost like a shibboleth: only those who actually went to the school will recognize the prestige.
Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for tier 3.
When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier colleges don't actually have the product that's in demand. So they can charge basically nothing since they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a business (unless they lie to students who don't know better and pretend that they're selling prestige they don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit ones are explicitly this.
If they actually provided valuable education that'd be different, but they largely don't.
I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education.
Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or economically viable on their own.
Actual education is super powerful, it's just a diminutive part of what Universities have become and they're not very good at it.
Actually, the top schools would benefit from these the most. With close to 100% employment rates and better median salaries than anyone else.
> Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant.
I wonder how much income stream is coming from underperforming programs at modern Universities. For some of them it must be substantial. And I'm also wondering if some of them also redirect the income toward more useful programs or research.
The top schools don't need ISAs because they're selling prestige they can charge a lot more for. Since they're so highly selective they can admit only students who will succeed anyway.
Maybe over time that prestige will change, but I don't see that as near-term. I think it'd be better if they did ISAs, I just don't think they'll want to (or their ISAs will be worse for students than Lambda School's).
Right now top schools can charge up front and it doesn't really matter what they provide.
You have clearly never studied Ancient Greek.
In a sense, studying Ancient Greek in depth is impossible as many ideas are lost in the modern cultural decline.
I've had the opposite experience.
I suspect a lot of this is because of enormous amounts of risk-free (to the schools) money from the government.
Also, different degrees definitely cost different prices - the cost of an MBA is far higher than the cost of a masters in history, for example.
Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose.
That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
Ya, and the acting students can learn about "compliers" online too. Outside of a garage startup, an engineer is useless if they cannot integrate into a larger team through the spoken and written word. I've run into BS students who haven't read a book since highschool. I've met compsci masters students who still panic if asked to stand up and explain their work to a large group. If a few hours learning about theatre helps solidify your language and presentation abilities, maybe it should be mandatory.
Students should just join a toastmasters
when we are paring costs, its best to keep the colleges to the very bare minimum of what they do well.
Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc.
If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.
The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics.
A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon.
Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame.
Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
“Typical” might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn’t buy it in the general case.
However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
That's a bit of a joke. Clarity is of course a primary virtue in all forms of academic writing, and one that is often ignored either unintentionally or in an attempt to impress one's reviewers and/or to signal one's membership in a particular tribe.
HackerNews tradition requires that I point out the considerable difference between software developer skills and knowledge of computer science.
Coding experience doesn't give you what a degree in computer science gives you, neither is a degree in computer science a substitute for experience as a developer.
I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality.
This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements.
It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings.
What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.
Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of.
Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that.
I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return.
LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different.
- They cap return to 30k.
- They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year.
- They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).
This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.
Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.
I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops.
Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.
Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree.
It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent.
Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids.
Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.
What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?
I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
“The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students.
Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers.
Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”