At the time, I was struggling to keep up with the marking demands of a new (i.e. This was the first year it was taught) course I was TA'ing. I had around a hundred students and each one was generating 10-20 pages of handwritten lab reports per week. Student writing varied from human typewriter to medical prescription from a meth-addicted doctor. I tried to grade everything fairly and provide feedback about mistakes so students could learn.
My fellow TA's complained to the department that we were well over the hours we were supposed to be spending by a factor of at least 3. We were told to do less. Just to be clear, I wasn't worried about how much I was being paid. The problem was that I had my own research and coursework to do. We simply needed more TA's in that course due to the way lab assignments were designed. The prof teaching the course was apologetic and furnished me with the above quote.
This is teaching at a research focused university in a nutshell. There is no shortage of people who want to do a good job teaching, but the system is designed to force them to spend their time on other things.
Why is an institution of higher learning so hostile to those who want to put an honest effort into teaching? Just as nobody has ever won a Nobel prize for having happy students, no research focused university ranks well if they aren't churning out a lot of papers. Teaching competes with that priority.
If we want better educational outcomes for students, we need to do a better job of aligning the incentives governing universities with that goal.
They said no program wants to hear how I want to teach and that absolutely no one will hire me, then I won’t get published, and I’ll end up (if I’m lucky!) teaching at an expensive boarding school in a place I don’t get to choose.
I’m not saying I would’ve gotten into even a decent program. Hell I may have been a mediocre at best teacher. But it never felt right to me that teaching at colleges isn’t a viable career path. It was so odd to learn that my dream was simply not allowed, especially when it seemed so reasonable.
These institutions are usually on the small side and don’t make money in grants because they don’t do research, so they don’t spend millions in advertising or in sending out interviewers to thousands of high schools. So there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of even the ones you live near to.
These schools tend to produce both better experiences (less reliance on the painful “weed-out course” degree plan architecture of huge school) and somewhat better outcomes. I will almost certainly be sending my kids to be PUI and not a megaversity when they’re older.
The two I can think of are Harvey Mudd and Rose Hulman.
Loyola Marymount University, in LA, fits the description. The STEM program wasn't the most competitive out there (but that's in comparison to nearby schools like UCLA, Cal Poly, etc), but the teaching quality was top-notch and there was a pretty direct pipeline from the engineering school to the big aerospace/defense contractors in the surrounding area.
I don't know anybody from any of my programs who isn't either gainfully employed in their field of study, or at some competitive grad school, and we graduated in the middle of COVID.
Of course it seems to be in a competition with USC to be the most expensive stickerprice university in the country, but the dirty little secret of private schools is that almost no one pays that price. To keep diversity up they shower disadvantaged students with scholarships, to keep academic standards up they shower academically competitive students with scholarships, and that's all paid for by charging the obscenely rich an elevated tuition, who in exchange are put in a situation where they're rubbing shoulders with a mix of talented students and a much higher than average concentration of other rich kids, leading to networking opportunities for everyone involved.
Disclosure: my alma mater is on that list.
This is related to the HN person yesterday asking whether going $180K in debt for MIT would be worth it?
I got an Associate's degree at a community college, and one of the most refreshing things about it was how un-focused the professors were on research. Teaching was their Number One, and I attribute much of my overall enjoyment to their attitudes.
I then transferred to a 4-year school and received my Bachelor's in two years. The professors at this university did research, but they were also committed to teaching and interpersonal relationships with students. I'd been given the option to transfer to a large (40k+ university), and although it was more well-known I knew that I'd be in gigantic class sizes with research-heavy instructors.
IME many aren't technically professors either, instead they're instructors. It's a weird distinction but academics huff and puff about it a lot.
My work has always had me “tech-adjacent.” Especially the way I operate. It’s kind of hard to explain in solid terms but yeah, a few years ago I found myself here and I’ve liked it ever since. A lot of the stuff is over my head, but that’s where I learn best. You never know where you’re going to find relevant information from seemingly irrelevant posts.
HN is also great for some of my hobbies. I like messing with computers, video games, modding, etc. and love reading about other hobbies and sub cultures. Also get a lot of great tech history content here.
They introduced this well after I graduated but I did take classes with some professors who became teaching professors. They were research professors when I took them.
I found the experienced professors competent even if some were uninspired. On the other hand, I generally had negative experiences with the graduate assistants and new professors.
The graduate students and new professors didn't know the material as well and didn't have much experience teaching. The older professors mostly knew the material much better and had an established process.
I had Stuart Russell, Raimund Seidel, Randy Katz, John Wawryznek, and others.
I also had a math class taught by a well meaning fresh professor. It was on the fast Fourier transform and related techniques leading to it. Great topic choice but very awkwardly and confusingly taught. It is actually hugely relevant to video compression and decompression.
My first semester teaching a lab I was told "No one is remembered for being a good TA" and encouraged to do the absolute bare minimum to get paid so that I could focus on research.
It's all about the money.
If you study for a PhD in the UK then the academic and research work is what you are there for and all that you do. And that means you get it done in much less time.
I'm not going to ban you right now, but please stop doing this so we don't end up having to.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
You left out one item though. The main role US institutions are trying to fill right now is: hire new faculty, have faculty pull in 5+ Million dollar grants in order to get tenure. After tenure, pull in multi-million dollar grants each year.
Teaching? Never heard of it. OH! That thing the actual customers are paying us for... yes, have graduate students or temporary emergency hires do it since all of our "real" faculty are bringing in research dollars.
Most of the actual work is done by trainees who are a) learning how to do <cutting-edge thing> for the first time and b) may never actually do it again because they're going to move onto something else. The profs are, at best, managing them and even that's often a bit iffy.
Everybody's obviously got to learn somewhere, but universities and research funders are oddly weird about experience and expertise.
- Enterprise sales rep with a $500k-$1M annual quota (aka grants).
- R&D manager of a team comprised almost entirely of junior employees
- Lecturer and administration for teaching.
- Administrator & volunteer within the department, chair roles for key academic conferences, and editor on major journals -- all to check the "service" box for tenure.
- Because they aren't a proper CEO, they don't even have the ability to push back on obscene G&A costs (ie 50%+ of grant contracts going to university overhead!).
It's a labor of love (esp in STEM!), and I feel bad that many are caught in this morass.
This is inaccurate. That would be 100% overhead, which is vanishingly rare (I've only encountered one institution above that rate, and they have to maintain research ships).
50% overhead means that the indirect costs of a grant are 50% of the direct costs, i.e. 1/3rd of the total grant. Notably, a lot of grant mechanisms (i.e. NIH R01s) are discussed at the direct cost rate, instead of the totals, so this doesn't "sting" nearly as badly as you all seem to think it does.
Additionally:
- I've seen private industry overhead rates. They're not lower. Indeed, many of them are quite a bit higher.
- A funder can specify a cap on overhead costs, and as long as that's public and known, every university I've ever been at has accepted it. The Gates Foundation is notorious for this, as are most charities. Hell, I had a grant from Merck that didn't pay "full freight".
- We push back on overhead costs all the time. Faculty are wily creatures. We have lots of ways.
That might be fine except then it leads to massive distortion in incentives, so faculty are being driven to bring in money rather than do research per se.
It's kinda like the classic stereotype of a drug company not putting any RD money into something where they can't control the profit, despite efficacy, only now you're talking about this happening at a nonprofit that's supposed to be committed to research for its own sake.
I am faculty, and while yes, we are incentivized to bring in money, we also have output too. And believe me, when talking to funders, "gee, I didn't do any work because I was bringing in more grants" is a pretty dangerous strategy.
Indirects also cover important things. On my current grants, the following are covered by indirect costs, just as examples.
- The data center and networking infrastructure where my particular nodes on our cluster live.
- My actual office, including things like the facilities folks that keep it clean, lighting and heating, IT infrastructure again, as well as things like paper for the printer because I prefer to read on actual paper.
- The library and journal subscriptions that provide me the material I actually need to read.
- The admins who are helping shepherd a position I'm hiring for through the process of doing that, posting the position descriptions on the relevant sites, etc. The one who put in a bunch of orders for me for an international project where it's cheaper to buy the stuff here, set it up, and then carry it with me than it is to get it there. The one who knows the reporting requirements I don't. The IRB admin who helped us figure out some human subjects issues around doing research that involves university employees in their capacity as employees. The admin that helped me actually prepare and submit the proposal.
- The attorney that helped review and sort out several fairly complex agreements, as well as a whole host of fairly simple ones that still needed to be checked.
- The senior level administrator (the usual boogeyman in these things) who is spearheading an effort to consolidate several of individual-level efforts into something that's coherent at the university level, so we can actually act on things that don't require individual-level researchers like me to have the bandwidth to keep a relationship alive, and which persists past turnover either at the university or the organizations we are working with.
- The startup funding for a new disease ecologist before I can put them on some new grants.
All of these help propel my research forward. My indirects pay for my share of these people's time and expertise. And importantly, they help cover things that I can't foresee, or are enough layers of removed from me that I don't even really know who we're paying as much as "This thing gets done".
Is there waste in our indirects? Sure. There's waste everywhere. But it's both hardly the terribly oppressive burden HN seems to think it is (even leaving aside that HN consistently does the math wrong) and something that exists in industry as well - it's just hidden in the total price.
Incidentally, my institution is also perfectly happy to just quote folks a fully burdened price.
What happens when we don't charge full indirect costs?
The taxpayers of my state end up making up the difference, because the lights, and the reporting bits, and the IRB, etc. still have to exist to get the work done. And for some projects one might be able to justify that, but for some others (waves at industry) I have a problem with it.
This is why a lot of grants are made in-kind rather than in cash. Give the research $750K in equipment instead of $1M in cash where the university pockets $500k of it.
Also, expressly, large capital expenditures like equipment are exempt from indirect costs at most universities.
HN's notion of how universities work is probably about as accurate as my notions of how VC funding works.
In my experience, in-kind grants mostly occur when the "giver" has/gets the "gift" cheaply. For example, NVIDIA gave out tons of graphics cards, but they certainly don't pay full retail for their own product. This lets them give you a grant "worth" $5k, but costs them substantially less. Ditto pharma companies, which may not even sell the thing given.
It seems clever to give the funder a shopping list, and then get an "in-kind" grant for exactly what you want. However, many places will waive/reduce indirect costs on equipment (which, per the NIH is $5000 and lasts for >1 year).
- getting paid below (barely above if you are lucky) 6 figures
- requires 3+ years of postdoc training which paid even worse
In his words, "Why would I not? They did most of the work."
I don't think the fact that they were making money on either was what surprised me or anyone else, but that they were making money on all of them at the same time.
Apparently that building is still standing, 20 years later, though I don't know who is using it now.
A friend of mine got on it after tenure (art school) because he could finance cool projects of his own design that way.
But even in a research university isn’t tenure supposed to protect you from being pushed around by the administration?
The publicly listed listed salaries are the 9-month salaries, so faculty pay isn't quite as bad as it looks at first glance. If you have funding, most grants also REQUIRE the professor to take salary money from it, otherwise they assume you aren't actually putting in any effort on that funded project.
However...that's not at all a good representation of the rest of the university. Maybe the very best research universities don't care about teaching. There aren't many though if you're not in a grant field.
> That thing the actual customers are paying us for
If you're in a grant field, the grant agency is the customer, not the students. Teaching is something you do on the side. And not very much compared to non-grant fields.
Indeed, "The student is the customer" is the source of a lot of really pretty flawed reasoning about how universities can and should work, including things like "Am I obligated to pass you because you really, really want to go to med school?"
This view is starting to become outdated. Plenty of schools now have a role known as "Teaching Professor" that focuses on teaching, with no research expectation. They have all the same qualifications as any faculty hired for the role, like a Ph.D. in the field. At UPenn at least they can even get tenure.
Hard Money: University-level funds (from the university, the state if a state school, etc.) provide a portion of your salary that doesn't have to be tied to a grant. This often comes with other obligations (i.e. teaching).
Most positions are a mix of the two in some form. Purely soft money positions, or >50% soft money positions, are common at some research institutes, medical schools, etc. Hard money positions that don't come with substantial non-research obligations are very rare.
> If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published.
Only within the boundaries of your particular field of study, which in most cases is far narrower than the scope of undergrad classes.
Choosing to go to a research institution seems like such an obviously poor choice it’s strange people get suckered into it. But it’s clear education is a low priority for both students and collages.
Higher education is very competitive with a wide range of business models. One of them is to have tight collaboration with industry to have undergrad and masters programs around Mining, Manufacturing, Medicine, etc focused on employability. Some are focused on night classes for government employees who get an automatic pay raise with a higher degree irrespective of what it’s in. Others are focused on continuing education requirements.
The high prestige research institutions can be a good fit, but aren’t the only option outside of small liberal arts schools.
The best educations happen in research labs. Undergraduates should get a good foundation years 1 and 2, and then find their way as a junior research assistant years 3 and 4 if they want to make the best of their University years. These days you can follow along with any course you want on YouTube. At University you are paying to get access to top researchers and the work they do.
There’s this unfortunate idea that tests are there for the school rather than the student. Avoiding misunderstanding is critical and getting something wrong is one way to discover them. But that’s really inefficient, the basic question and answers with a professor are why your not simply reading from a textbook or watching a YouTube video.
That said, if you went to a horrible collage I can see why you would think YouTube was just as good and doing research was the real secret to learning.
I'm not necessarily assuming that. I think there seems to be an assumption here that the choice is research or internship, but not both. That is not the case. Students do research with me during a typical semester, and when they are done the school year, they often go and get industry internships over the summer at top companies around the world. We train them to pass the Google-style whiteboard coding interviews; our students are very prepared for those. I don't know of any students who do internships during the school year. Most of my students who do research with me do not go on to do graduate studies.
maybe if you're the kind of undergrad that has a good shot at google straight out of college, this doesn't make as much sense. I guess if you do two summer internships at FAANGs, you already look really good and may as well diversify your experience. my guess is that does not apply to the vast majority of cs majors that are just in it to get a decent job.
I'll have to defer to your experience on undergrad research though. what do you see as the value add from doing research as a student who has no intention of continuing school after undergrad?
> If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years
Is the heart of the problem. For a long time, this was basically the core function of universities - to make people part of the elite. We told ourselves that it was actually about the things being taught rather than social connections. Maybe to a certain extent it even was.
But then, operating on that assumption, we say, what gives these people the right to be elites? Let's make it more accessible! Send anyone who's smart enough and can afford it to school.
We do that. And many of them do go on to get better and higher-paying jobs. To some extent, society creates more jobs for them to do, and to some extent, existing jobs get education inflation, requiring advanced degrees for no real reason.
But why stop there? This is biased against the people who can't afford it. Let's create a ton of scholarships and student loan programs to make it more affordable so more people go. This kind of works, and kind of increases the prices even more (due to bad design of the loan system) and increases education inflation some too.
We've already made it so attractive, might as well tell all high school students that they're failures if they don't go to college, even if it really isn't for them. Tell 'em that so hard that the blue-collar jobs we do still need start to have trouble getting employees and sometimes actually increase in wage past the point of some degree-requiring jobs.
The way the whole financing of the system works makes the whole thing a huge money-pit too, which helps it keep absorbing more functions.
It sure feels like the whole system has gone crazy and needs some major reworking. I'm not sure what the new healthier system would look like or how we transition to it, but something needs to happen. Sorry, not everyone can be the elite. We should stop telling people that they're a failure in life if they don't join the elite and stop making them perform signs of elite status, like degrees at high-ranked universities, to get jobs that ultimately aren't all that important.
I find your last paragraph a bit troubling, I agree that becoming a part of the elite does not really have a significance with regards to your own worth. But the USA is not a country that revolves around the middle class, its a country that revolves around the elites. In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is made to benefit, empower and sustain elites. Becoming part of the elite is a very good way of sustaining your family and the future family of your family for generations to come. Look at the downward versus upward mobility! To pretend like there is a social class that just isn't for everyone is extremely offensive; everyone should have the same chance. Not everyone can be the best, but everyone who wants to should have a fair shot at it and universities and education as a whole is the best way we have to pave the way.
In Europe, in most countries, universities are accessible to all and they do have some excellent institutions. But not only that, children of all social classes go to the same schools (yes you do have mega elites but I'm talking here about the vast majority of the population) on the other hand compare that to america where children go to school that depends on their location and where you have an incredible disparity between where the poor and where the rich live. How could you say "not everyone can be part of the elite" when being part of the elite is already largely determined on the area you were born in!
I think the US education system needs a complete reform and so much has to change, but really, if youre a politician and you are part of the elite what incentive do you have to make things harder for you and your class? Your kid is going to a top high school then its going to go to a top university. And their kids will do the same if you keep things the way they are.
Education is good, but it should be as cheap and simple as possible. Putting it in universities that cost more than the per-capita GDP to attend is about as far from that as it gets. If we take that system and call it a "human right" and get the Government directly involved in paying for it, we're only making it worse by institutionalizing all of the bad practices that make it so insanely expensive, making it even more difficult to ever change and effectively extracting even more money from the people who don't use it.
Education is also not for everyone, and not at every time. People should pursue it because they actually want it, not because they perceive or are told they need it to succeed in life. We shouldn't tell kids they're destined for failure if they don't go to college, shouldn't shame people for being interested in jobs that don't need college, and shouldn't require college degrees for jobs that don't actually need it.
What we do with positive rights is bundle them up into government provided services, so the load gets distributed evenly through society. These tend to work well, at least in Europe. I really can't understand the US view that anything that is state-provided is inefficient.
All rights require active participation of others to provide. Negative rights such as the right to live and the right to have property don't exist by default. They only become real if the society spends sufficient effort to prevent people from killing and stealing.
Human rights are aspirational. They are not rights people already have but rights people should have. They are the desired outcomes in an ideal society.
Status and class in the US blows. It doesn’t seem to be much different in Europe either.
First, by definition, not everyone can be elite. Hell, you can't even get more than 50% of the population to be better than average! -- its math.
And if "In America not being part of the elite is a failure because the political and economical system is made to benefit, empower and sustain elites." is true (which seems likely), then maybe that is what needs to change.
A good step would be as you suggest, to start to massively invest in education and childhood health.
That's quite a fantasy - many people in Europe who can, enlist their kids in private schools because they don't want them to go to integrated schools. Why? Because in cities like Amsterdam integrated schools usually have a big amount of children of immigrants who are poorer and harder to teach. So the teachers who go there are also oftentimes not the best (since the best teachers go to private schools). I'm not saying everyone does this, but it's getting quite common for those who can afford it.
The premise is faulty from the onset. Most ‘top’ European schools are mediocre outside of liberal arts degrees.
Truth is the education quality doesn't correlate that strongly with "top" University ranking; at above top X ranked university, or top university in respective country, the quality of education is mostly the same. The difference in the ranking only really reflects the research output/opportunities and networking opportunities.
This becomes so glaringly clear as soon as you start being the interviewing side of the job.
European elites seems to not go to US top universities either; top talent (in intelligence) from upper middle class and above, maybe. But there's more to gain networking in their own countries top universities than abroad. (hence the exchange year system for that)
I think the point of the top level comment here is exactly what you've said and additionally that the networking opportunities are actually what matter for success.
But it is RWTH
I went there because it was supposed to be the best university in my state. But it did not help my career at all
I should have tried to get into a US university
/tinfoilhat mode off.
"To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...
In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.
As a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse. Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom."
- teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs
- teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture
is part of the problem. When you go back and look at many of science and philosophy’s “greatest,” they were almost always deeply curious and inquisitive people and interested in many things, not just what they are known for now. They read other “greats” and were well-balanced intellectually.
I think a problem now is we are producing unbalanced minds, the equivalent of a bodybuilder who skips leg day, every day. Perhaps there is some something to be said about encouraging a diversity of thought, people who read poetry as you say. It is likely no coincidence that genuine genius is extremely divergent and radical in thought, likely not someone who learns physics and only physics with no other interests.
There is a really good chance they would be lured away to Wallstreet to work at a hedge fund or Silicon Valley to work on the latest CRUD application.
Especially Einstein. There is no way he would have ever been a clerk today. He would be doing something that Physics would be a massive pay cut.
I don't think the point is that these people don't exist today but the point is that people of this level can make so much more money than doing physics. It wasn't that long ago that a University Professor was a high end job that a person could afford a second vacation home and a ton of status came along with the position.
If you split these two - say, had a national assessment and credentialing program that didn't require a college education - I bet most students would find much cheaper, better, and quicker ways to learn than college.
To put it another way, if the university system was a public company, there would be activist shareholders advocating that the company be split. Each of these entities would perform better without the distractions of the others.
One problem with splitting, is that each sub-system has become somewhat parasitic on the other three to a harmful degree, as you hint at. The particular blend depends on the university. For example, NCAA division III teams would not survive without the subsidies of a university. But maybe they shouldn't?
As is the "4 year college experience" nonsense that has students travelling "away from home for the first time".
It's entirely a US-based dysfunctional system.
The problem with tertiary education is that it is now considered "necessary" for most employment, so therefore what used to be research institutions are now considered just an extension of secondary education.
But at the same time, the research aspect of university, being a repository of knowledge and of learning has been reduced by academic beancounters to literally counting names on papers in journals.
Tertiary undergraduate degrees are entirely vocational and should be taught that way. No one expects senior high school teachers to also "publish or perish" or be responsible for bringing grants and income into the high school.
If I'm hiring someone in my field (IT) I literally don't care if they have done a post graduate degree. Completing an MSc or PhD or equivalent adds nothing to the characteristics I want in an IT employee.
The same applies to pharmacists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, art curators, librarians, accountants, marketers, etc, etc. They are all vocations and require the same sort of training structure that applies to plumbers and electricians and plasterers and roof installers.
If someone wants to be a physicist or chemist, or a computer scientist, or a mathematician, or an art historian, or other actual "liberal arts and sciences" role, then that should be an undergraduate degree in "researcher" along with the fundamentals of their chosen art/science field.
And to get back to the original point about college sports, if someone wants to be a professional sportsperson, then that is again a vocational degree with a specialization.
Just so professors dont have to act oblivious as to why students are there, some still revert to “wdym, you should be here for the pursuit of learning”
But there is merit to that, the schools reserved for the upper echelon of society (in terms of most coveted exclusive network and access) have been around for like 300 years, they can weather this several decade long meme of inclusion and the coincidental corporate sector that has people convinced they need degrees to access that (and why expanded audiences want to be included in those school’s admissions to begin with)
“Hey current Dean and former US Treasury Secretary and cabinet member, remember that time when the proletariat was trying to go here? Are those dark ages going to be on the evaluation?”
A year of trade school for some very general health and safety / common sense / anything they missed in high school, then into the workplace to learn from people actually doing the job.
It's pretty unique that the US has the resources for these advances that developed nations have and simply doesn't do them. Part of it is the insular nature of where policy inspiration comes from, it has to be seen as a homegrown original idea, which hampers consensus making because examples of it working elsewhere also aren't accepted.
Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the public should pay the ever escalating costs while suggesting nothing to rein in their growth. This suggests that the politicians have been captured in some way.
To that end, a quick google search yields an article that gives a good set of reasons a think-tank that studied the problem found as a set of causes. This is the first result of googling "what caused the student debt crisis":
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-the-student-debt-cris...
Now those four items ARE things that have changed between now and then. Generally, the decline state funding of schools means unis now fund themselves by relying on tuition that students do not feel as a cost (at least immediately) because the federal government can give out loans like candy.
Again people, please please please don't just conjure up ideas in your head and think you understand the causes in the world that explain how everything works. You would not apply this line of thinking to your own job you are paid for, people have studied these things and generally it is understood why the debt crisis exists, it isn't a mystery!
Colleges were captured by professional administrators. That’s what’s changed, and the results are entirely predictable.
See, also, hospitals.
As another example, we have a bunch of internal grants. It's basically free money that you can apply for to do whatever you want with it, to the tune of 10s of thousands. We need to pay administrators to handle that whole process. It's a lot of money to handle and it's not a cheap process to administer these grants. We could cut them and it would shrink the budget, but it would also stop the flow of early-stage ideas from forming that later turn into huge grants. If I have an idea that might cost like $10k, I can whip up a proposal and get funding for that lickity split, without having to go to the NSF or some other external agency. Then when the idea is more mature I can go and get external funding. If you cut the administrators just looking at a budget, you're really cutting research without realizing it.
I mean, running a University is basically like running a city. You have all the same concerns: infrastructure, food, security, a citizenry, political struggles, etc. You need a government (administrators) to do that kind of work that keeps this huge system running. Yes bureaucracies are expensive and inefficient, and sure there are of course things that could be cut, but by and large the University I work at gets the job done. Day in and day out for 10s of thousands of students. That machine doesn't just happen, it's administrators keeping it running.
The students get their piece of paper that employers use as a free-to-them proxy for intelligence and diligence. I won’t cry at all when this exploitative business model is disrupted and lots of administrators have to find honest work.
This is, as I understand it, correct. Administrators as a percentage of university staff has ballooned. The explanation I've seen for this is that they are needed to handle ever increasing amounts of regulations. This is the same problem faced by hospitals.
I’m cynical about this. “These damn regulations! It would be so much better for us… I mean for the public… if we could get rid of them.”
Too simplistic and too much incentive to blame regulations. No doubt it’s a burden, and some regulations are overzealous and misguided, but there’s probably more to it.
It’s a significant burden to the chemical factory when you make it illegal for them to dump their waste in the river (greed bad!). It’s also a burden to society because now we have to police their douchebaggery. Then there’s the (inevitable) chance that this policing is corrupted or becomes inefficient (regulations bad!). Probably a flawed analogy, but it’s what I think of whenever there’s an argument for or against regulation.
As an exercise, I sat down one day and listed the administrators that if I was suddenly president of my university should begin considering updating their resumes. Each one was a problem as a person, but the position was one I would want refilled - indeed, at least one of them was currently running a badly understaffed office.
Meanwhile, states have pulled back or failed to increase university funding, and the universities fill the gap with greater tuition. Here's the story+graph for the University of California system: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapt... This is the GP's point, and completely spot on.
It is also true that there are more MBA's in the admin buildings and that they suck, and are likely paid more than they should be. But while I think it /is/ a factor, it's likely not the biggest bottleneck.
If this is the primary factor we should expect student debt load for private school graduates to have grown much more slowly than for public school graduates, right?
It may be that the increasing admin staff has taken advantage of this situation more ruthlessly than good communist professor admins would have,
Why are we giving non profit tax benefits to profit maximizers?
Even into the 1980s buildings were simple brutalist concrete dungeons and A/C was not an expectation; there was no campus IT; no plethora of career placement systems; counseling office; Title IX compliance office; free medical clinics; fancy rec centers, and numerous other amenities.
And that's the problem! Go for a haircut and you can see the effect on a micro scale. Hair salons and barbershops have remained almost entirely unchanged for decades, yet the price of a haircut has skyrocketed. Why is that? Because you wouldn't be able to hire any hairdressers at $2/hour. Haircuts are more expensive because hairdressers need more money to live. Rent has gotten more expensive for hairdressers, just as it has for everyone else.
Increases in productivity due to automation have generated vast amounts of new wealth. It's the overall increase in wealth which has driven up real estate prices and the cost of rent. Replace the hairdresser in the above example with a doctor or a lecturer and the situation remains the same. The services of these jobs/professions have become dramatically more expensive because:
a) They cannot be automated to achieve the productivity gains seen in other sectors.
b) If wages in these sectors were to remain flat then they would see an exodus of workers to other sectors.
c) Some costs in life, such as shelter, are fixed by the availability of land. Land is finite but the demand for land continues to grow. This issue has been discussed extensively here on HN but all of the solutions I've seen are temporary. Ultimately, we could turn the entire planet into Coruscant and we would still see rent prices going up!
1) the staff to student ratio is going up
2) average pay for instructional staff is falling on an inflation adjusted basis
Also, unlike a haircut or knee surgery there’s no reason to believe that education should be difficult to automate if it were actually education that was being sold.
State school tuition cost have crushed the general level of inflation increases because it is easy money for the state and there is no state that does not love extra money to spend.
In 2008, state funding dried up, and has not returned, even in places with booming economies.
Federal funding via research grants has been, at best, flat over the same time period.
That leaves only one dial left to universities.
Agreed. See the recent UCLA TA position opening. The unpaid position.
From Indian perspective I see this part broken big time as well.
It takes 4 years to graduate with an engineering degree where as the core content could very well be taught well under 2 years.
The first year is common across all streams; so one is taught workshop/welding, workings of ICE and what not. 3rd semester the specialisation topics are gingerly introduced with heavy emphasis on adjacent courses (e.g., CS students are taught analogue electronics). Heavy duty math is taught for 4 semesters (PDE, Laplace transforms and what not). Only from 5th semester do the stream-specific topics start in full earnest. Then there are some fluffy courses which don't make any sense if one doesn't have experience working in as a s/w engineer; OOPs, Software Engineering.
What's worse, the syllabus has only been slightly tweaked for last 50 years or so.
I say this as a software engineer professional of 15+ years; I've had to use less than 15% of what I learnt in those 4 years. It's such a waste of precious time. Engineering education needs to radically change in India. Something similar to trade-school in Germany? Part time theory, part time working/interning under professionals? Even that shouldn't be more 2.5 years IMO.
Of course, the ever-growing expense of all the pomp and palaces will eventually bankrupt the whole system - just as the expense of the French King's court at Versailles eventually lead to the French Revolution.
If they don't solve these things, then yeah you might see lower admission rates + quality of students' work.
It is similar to how when growing crops, like wheat, you should take the best of your harvest and use it for seed. Historically that is one of the most important and also one of the hardest things to teach farmers.
+ Many of the greats have loved teaching and benefited from the process. E.g. Richard Feynman, etc...
Teaching undergraduates is easily accomplished by another not working on research imho.
They should be teaching a few grad students.
Come on. Most professors are not Feynman. This is exactly the problem if anything.
Sports teams in theory pay for themselves with revenue. That's a matter of accounting and debate, but in theory it's just recreation. It's not really a conflict.
Marketable skills vs "how to think" is basically the domain of knowledge you study. Want more skills? pick that major. These can all coexist in the same institution and have for 100s? 1000s? of years.
The issue is the financing, facilities bloat, marketing on the basis of non-academics, inabiility to properly measure academic value, class paranoia, and the rise of the vampire administration class has blown out the cost of a high-reputation degree by a factor of 10.
Universities used to do its core activities/competencies with much less opulent housing, unnecessary buildings, basic auditoriums and rooms, basic labs. I'll put aside research here since grants will fund the facilities they need to do the research. Sports teams should theoretically self-fund their own facilities.
The issue is the bloated cost vs the value of the degree.
What the country needs is high-reputation high-value degrees from very modest/focused institutions. Like military-style boot camps (in terms of austerity, not authoritarianism) where you are focused on the mission of gaining knowledge and not about living in a cool dorm room, watching a good football team, drinking to oblivion. Those are ancillary, they can be there, but they can't be the focus.
That comes down to the institution mission, and selecting students in the right way.
Colleges used to be based on the quality of the people that come out of the institution. Now they are too broadly graded on non-academic and non-performance.
Collegiate athletics emerged as lucrative entertainment, over decades. It's not as if they established sports teams originally in order to make money or to become training ground for pro teams. And good luck getting them to forfeit this willingly.
A minor league could show up to compete, but would it offer athletes an opportunity for a rite of passage too? And could it offer a hedge for the athletes who don't graduate to higher pro leagues? IMO baseball is probably a good place to look for answers because it has both a minor pro league and NCAA "student-athletes". Ice hockey, too, IIRC.
The professionalization of sports is a short history. And college sports becoming the huge media sensation it is today also a recent phenomenon.
Also, Baseball being the outlier to Football/Basketball when it comes to collegiate leagues probably comes from its very early professionalization relative to the latter two.
Could a single team in other sports go against all the rest in modern times? I highly doubt it.
PS - Rickey was passionate about collegiate sports and the role they played on campuses.
This is partially true. Most Americans still go the NCAA route the typical Canadian route being the CHL, for 16-20 year olds. Europeans follow a model similar to European soccer leagues.
The CHL offers a year of college scholarship for each year played in the league. I think it's only for the national schools, I'm not exactly sure.
I don’t know where you got the idea that learning about “art” is an essential job of college. I wish it were, but it’s not. And I agree that college sports are too big of their own business.
Fundamentally you cannot “train” people for jobs that don’t exist yet. I went to college only 2 decades ago and nothing remotely like my job existed at the time.
You can educate people in college though, and that is what is required to keep our society moving forward. (And prevent it from sliding backward.)
I've heard this phrase multiple times before... and yet, doctors have been studying bio, lawyers studying laws/cases, and engineers math - for hundreds of years. I don't want someone who did 4 years of philosophy and knows how to think deeply about things performing my heart surgery.
The first three bullet points are not the same thing partly because one of those bullet points specifically addresses job training, and one addresses "how to think". You're right that knowing how to think is important, but acting like hard skills don't exist is taking things too far imo.
a) you’re not getting that, if you know anything about med school admissions and b) why not? This is such a reductivist view of knowledge and talent.
Well, part of the value of an institution like Harvard is that it connects those two groups of people. Wickliffe IV gets to meet Noah or Kumar or Xiao who got 1600s on their SAT and recommends them to his dad for positions at his investment bank.
(Not saying we suceed but we try almost because we don’t have a choice)
They focused on providing high equality undergraduate education.
No sports, research requirements, etc.
They found they could easily recruit junior faculty, but as the faculty got experience, they “cashed out” for a better position.
The “standard model” is hard to deviate from. Some schools do it, but it requires a large endowment, and there’s a gravitational pull towards sports teams and research grants.
Light data for this: freshman admissions, at least within the state of Georgia, commonly have exemptions made for athletes: https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/
That depends. Fundamental research is a tiny field and prodigies should perhaps stay there. But otherwise you want the best of the best to educate the next generation as a general rule. Their task is vastly more complex as to convey the plain material. That teachers have such a low regard is indicative of a highly anti-intellectual position, which of course makes the job fairly unattractive for anyone talented.
To supply researchers with resources that their work is not inhibited is often a logistically trivial problem, especially in modern times. So research and education can and should remain intertwined for the most part. Progress is about the pipeline too.
You forgot the most important one for companies: use college or the preference for "ivy league" institutions which is on its own a neutral requirement as a proxy to weed out "undesirables" without violating the ADA and other laws: people with mental health issues and many physical disabilities don't stand a chance for the top grades, as do people from poor financial background.
It's all about keeping "corporate culture" aka White, rich and able. Anyone else is left for the bottom jobs of society.
What world are you living? Colleges and "Corporate culture" these days are all about opposing "whiteness."
In reality?! Just look at the C and VP level of most large companies. Old white men galore [1] [2], and lower management and the drones aren't much better. And by the time a woman takes the helm, the company has often been run into the ground so hard that the board can't find another man willing to risk his reputation.
To make it worse, during the 'rona female representation at C-level actually fell [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women_CEOs_of_Fortune_...
[2] https://cooleypubco.com/2021/06/09/board-diversity-fortune-5...
[3] https://www.channelpartnerinsight.com/news/4045218/fewer-wom...
The impact of this issue is, if anything, greater on the cost of research than it is on the cost of an education. A major academic institution is the single most expensive place you could do research - because everything costs much more than it should, the headcount on any project is stratospheric, and everything moves so slowly that you pay much more for each "head" than you ought to. That has downstream affects that kneecap every industry reliant on academic research, from industrial and military competitiveness to medicine. It's also why there has been interest for decades, and seems to be increasing interest now, in private research lab investment from large philanthropists - it is legitimately cheaper and faster to pull a Paul Allen and stand up a new research lab from scratch than it is to get the same research done through traditional academic means.
Scott Galloway (who I know is somebody everybody has an opinion about now) has scoped this problem really well, though I've been much less impressed experientially with his solution (Section4). You're spot-on - if we optimized for creating productive members of society (bullet #2) and preparing individuals for financial independence and productivity (bullet #1) individually - or even just ceded #2 temporarily (which is a role, arguably, existing colleges are failing at anyway) and optimized toward #1 - it could be done much more cheaply than it is being done today. NOT through any kind of high-minded shift in how education is done, as education, in the sense of a teacher-in-a-classroom-teaching-students-supported-by-TAs, is not broken, and has worked for centuries. But college today is like a really bad cable bill, where the vast majority of users are paying for one thing (ESPN), but have their cost burdened by 90% of the package being a required purchase that they don't want. (All the other channels)
Other dimensions of the problem better support disruption, but most directly, your point would be well addressed by colleges simply reducing overservice. Of course, that implies gargantuan changes to the structure of these institutions, which will be wildly uncomfortable for a lot of individuals who are currently supported by them.
If there's one domino that should fall first, it's the student-athlete one.
It's the easiest one to break away (relative to everything else) and should be the cleanest too.
It's all fever dream of Utopia that made sense to post war boomers with good intentions but now the execution spirals out of control. Maybe a car or a degree or a suburban home is right for some people, but as a one size fits all solution that is indoctrinated since birth and in some cases part of peoples identity, it becomes absurd.
College will continue because we will remain irrational about these 3 things much longer than you can remain solvent.
If you were a student (or the parent of a student) looking to advance in your field, and you had the choice, would you choose Harvard or say a local community college trade school? It's easy to make massive sweeping sociological choices for the public without considering that you yourself would not make that choice. Obviously, multiply your preferences times every student in the field.
If you want to say there's a funding crisis and you want to deal with that funding crisis in some other way, then yes, I agree.
Also, I don't personally care for sports. I still think they have a place at a University, just not to the extent that they're funded. If independent undergraduate research projects were awarded (and advertised!) with the same funding as sports teams and sports teams had their funding lowered, I think that might be interesting. Incubator lab competitions in science research projects that would have the results published in journals. Start up accelerators with paid promotions etc etc.
How else to organize the budget at universities I don't know how to speculate. It means that with a finite amount of money some resource is getting cut somewhere and someone else is having an increase in endowment which gets super political. I'm also not necessarily sure that cutting liberal arts is a good idea. Many of the people I went to school with (at least one I helped pass advanced maths...) spent the majority of their time drinking and ended up working in investment banks. Forcing them to read a little poetry or sit through a lecture or two on a few sociology courses is maybe a good idea so that when they're out there ruling the (financial) universe they have a bit of awareness of the way the rest live.
My thoughts for what they're worth.
IMO we don't really need the best and brightest minds to teach undergraduate level classes, most of the contents are not really that cutting edge and can probably be standardized. We want to best minds to teach, but I think they should teach research students rather than large classes.
> the lower tier schools will attract only those teachers who are more interested in pedagogy than the subject, or who themselves are not as qualified.
Sounds better than lower tier schools attracting teachers who are not interested in teaching at all... The current system mainly considers research output, so schools trying to increase their competitiveness will push the professors to spend more time on research and less time on teaching. Teachers who are very qualified in teaching might not be able to spend much time in teaching at all.
Wrong.
“I disgree. People at the cutting edge should be educating others both to help them make their ideas accessible and connect them with the future of their discipline.”
I encourage you to add more than a single word to the conversation.
I was writing for people such as you. As for the rest? Well anyone who can’t make such a trivial inference obviously has nothing interesting to say about didactic methods.
If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching.
If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.