'Colleges Oversold Education. Now They Must Sell Connection' (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180340049
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/09/1511224/colleges-oversold-education-now-they-must-sell-connection
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/education-and-learning/higher-education/contributor-colleges-oversold-education-now-they-must-sell-connection/ar-AA1RVwLD
Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/education-and-learning/higher-education/contributor-colleges-oversold-education-now-they-must-sell-connection/ar-AA1RVwLD
Oversold? and? (Score:5, Insightful)
Overpriced it. They have gutted the value of it by charging way too much for it.
Re: Oversold? and? (Score:2, Troll)
You can thank student loans for that. Earlier generations got their schooling subsidized, but now people have to get loans to pay for it themselves instead. Colleges therefore could raise tuition. Then a bipartisan effort in Congress was launched to make sure we couldn't discharge those loans through bankruptcy like you can gambling or other personal debts, which was led by Joseph R Biden. I think we know how that turned out, forgiveness for a few of the worst abused players, and blaming inability to keep h
College was always this expensive (Score:3, Informative)
we just used to subsidize it more. When we were kids the government paid 70% of tuition, most of it was money given directly to the colleges who passed that money on to you and me via lower cost tuition.
In the early 2000s Bush Jr and the Republican party slashed those subsidies, which is why the cost shot up. It's got nothing to do with administrative costs or fancy dorms (the dorms literally are paid for by rent paid by students, I know, I put my kid in one of the prison style dorms in college because
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No. College price inflation has far exceeded CPI for decades. Only in the last few years has that changed.
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According to [1]https://www.usinflationcalcula... [usinflatio...ulator.com] for the period from Jan 1978 to Jan 2025, college price CPI went from , CPI for college was 60 in 1978 and 937 in 2024, while CPI overall went only from 63 to 318.
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/
Read my post again (Score:4, Informative)
We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.
If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.
But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.
Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.
Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.
The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.
We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.
But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.
Universities are Responsible Too (Score:3)
This is partially true. Yes, the subsidies made a huge difference, particularly for state universities. However, that doesn't fully explain the challenge. Part of this also fall on universities whose cost structures have exploded. Some of it is driven by new technologies that have created entire IT departments, some is driven by government compliance requirements (Title IX, research grants, etc.), and [1]some is simply self-replicating bureaucracy [bowdoin.edu]. Universities can't simply blame the government, particularly p
[1] https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-by-a-thousand-emails-how-administrative-bloat-is-killing-american-higher-education/
Or hear me out (Score:4, Insightful)
Make it less expensive. I know, perish the thought.
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> Make it less expensive
Okay, sure.
How.
By paying faculty less? Most institutions have already turned over huge proportions of their teaching to low-paid adjuncts and TAs.
By paying administrators less? Most administrators don't make that much money (usually much less than the faculty), and many such positions are designed to do a task (e.g., managing faculty travel expenses) more efficiently than faculty.
By cutting amenities? When you cut amenities or just don't keep up with the latest and greatest, students don't come.
So,
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Some from all of those but a lot comes from #2 where admin costs have outpaced teaching costs in both total expenditure and rate of increase.
We can say amenities will keep students away but you'd have to show me what we're cutting and is that worth the high tuition (which also keep students away) and the value proposition (also keeps students away)
[1]https://www.usnews.com/educati... [usnews.com]
Also to say it's incredulous to say the US can reduce the cost of school would imply that the costs are the same in the rest of t
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs
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> admin costs have outpaced teaching costs in both total expenditure and rate of increase
Yes, when you cut teaching costs by hiring adjuncts and TAs, you still need staff to manage those you've hired and run all of the other aspects of the institution (such as admissions offices). And, counting only "costs" without looking at revenue is deceptive, because much of the revenue from students now comes in areas (such as housing and dining) that are only administrators (no faculty) but produce lots of revenue that support instruction and research.
> We can say amenities will keep students away but you'd have to show me what we're cutting and is that worth the high tuition (which also keep students away) and the value proposition (also keeps students away)
If I could answer this with a simple answer, I wouldn
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> because much of the revenue from students now comes in areas (such as housing and dining)
This is a fundamental problem with the business model then.
> If I could answer this with a simple answer, I wouldn't be poking around on Slashdot, I'd be selling consulting services to all colleges and universities that also want to answer this question.
So it's somewhat pointless if neither of us can be specific. Are you saying there are no amenities to be cut?
> Some of those amenities are 'must haves,' and for many students in the middle of the market for higher education a few thousand dollars a year more in cost is worth it to have a modern place to live, something to do outside of class (like a rec center), and buildings that are not falling down; not to mention excellent food, access to counseling and advising.
If we are calling those "amenities" then we have a definition problem. Put all those things together and you have "a campus". Talking about things besides those.
> Yes, the US spends more than many other countries on a degree, but our cost of living is also much higher than many other countries and the BENEFITS of a degree (even in $$ earnings) is higher than in many other countries, too.
Did you look at the list though? We are more expensive by a long shot than similarly developed nations. Same problem with healthcare, nations with similar GDP/capita and we spend
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> If we are calling those "amenities" then we have a definition problem. Put all those things together and you have "a campus". Talking about things besides those.
...such as...? Other than athletics those are pretty much the main amenities offered at most places.
> We are more expensive by a long shot than similarly developed nations. Same problem with healthcare
Yes, and health care IS part of the problem. Health insurance costs make up a huge portion of personnel costs (20% or more). Offload that to a single-payer, federal system, and suddenly college can be much cheaper.
> if most Americans could keep everything about the healthcare in America but the cost per-capita was $7k like Finland, Australia, France, Canada, etc instead of close to $15k then we are having a much much different discussion
To be fair, people in those countries are also healthier than people in the U.S.; so we also have a health problem in addition to a health care cost problem
> community colleges at that point are subsidized education, IE, government supported and basically we would do away with most of the federal loan programs
That's not going to happen, at least not a
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> ...such as...? Other than athletics those are pretty much the main amenities offered at most places.
You brought up amenities
> Yes, and health care IS part of the problem. Health insurance costs make up a huge portion of personnel costs (20% or more). Offload that to a single-payer, federal system, and suddenly college can be much cheaper.
I agree, that's not a college specific issue though, it effects every aspect of our economy and college costs have way way way outpaced inflation over other sectors the last 50 years. Something else is happening. I was mainly using it as a parallel in that they both suffer from the same fundamental economic problem (how can you have market forces for something people *have* to have. You can't, it requires intervention)
> To be fair, people in those countries are also healthier than people in the U.S.; so we also have a health problem in addition to a health care cost problem
Agree, these are all inter-related though, but again, not col
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How?
By making public education a public good, paid for by the public (aka government, aka taxes) and setting real requirements to participate: grades and test scores to get in to college, can't keep up = flunk out. Community College and Trade Schools for the rest of us.
Teachers have to teach for a living. Drop "publish or perish" requirements. Researchers are not teachers. Research institutions are not schools (although they could offer internships for students to learn practical research skills while c
College education is still worth it (Score:1, Interesting)
Studies still clearly show that you will earn more money and have a more stable career regardless of the major you pick.
Everything is going to shit so there are no guarantees like there was for the boomers. Nobody is going to build you a house with government money like they did for the boomers.
But if we are talking about probabilities you should still go to school.
A whole bunch of very rich assholes want you to think that you don't have any use for an education because they are tired of paying
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Until we're going French Revolution on the "intelligencia". It's pretty easy to build a guilloutine, you know.
Which brings me to a funny thought: The communists went after academics... and today communism is growing primarilly in academia. How the turntables, huh?
The French revolution didn't work (Score:1)
The monarchy was restored and the only reason it eventually fell is that the merchant class overtook monarchies as the ruling elite.
We basically traded one set of Masters for another.
Violent revolutions don't really work because people who are good at violence don't usually give up power and will set themselves up with power following the violence.
I'm not sure what the solution is but it's not going to be a revolution. I don't think we actually have a solution and I think we are eventually going
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It's not just about being good at violence and bad at letting go of power, there's the matter of the revolution's end goal. If the revolution is for the purpose of overthrowing the existing power and replacing it with something that never existed before, the people trying to build that new thing will not let go of it and will eventually murder each other. That's what happened in France, Russia, Cambodia, etc. If the purpose is restoring something the people in charge took away, like the American Revoluti
Re: College education is still worth it (Score:2)
Given the 100 year time difference, I suspect these two groups you identify as communist aren't actually the same people.
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Do you have any way to suss out correlation versus causation on that?
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Yeah you can read the studies but basically jobs that don't involve a college degree require that you build up over time to a higher income and when you lose those jobs you're starting over because without that degree employers do not value your experience.
Furthermore college educated employees tend to be more productive because they are not doing the work of one person but instead building out systems that due to work of multiple people. In the cases where they are doing individual work it's typically
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It's worth *something*, but the price has been outpacing inflation by a wide margin for years and years.
So we have value, but the price has been running away...
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> It's worth *something*, but the price has been outpacing inflation by a wide margin for years and years.
> So we have value, but the price has been running away...
This is my thought. Being somewhat pedantic I feel like oversold is not quite right as there is still value in what they are selling, but they are going overboard on the costs to provide the degree. Many local/State colleges are still more than worthwhile.
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>> It's worth *something*, but the price has been outpacing inflation by a wide margin for years and years.
>> So we have value, but the price has been running away...
> This is my thought. Being somewhat pedantic I feel like oversold is not quite right as there is still value in what they are selling, but they are going overboard on the costs to provide the degree. Many local/State colleges are still more than worthwhile.
If I were to hazard a guess, I'll note that in my place of employment for the past 30 plus years, there were groups like HR that would employ some of the more esoteric Liberal art majors, degreed people.
Today, there are perhaps more candidates than positions, and yes, some majors are considered a bit toxic.
We have created this problem by making available loans that allowed people who perhaps didn't have much business being in college to spend 4 years or more of their life living and going to school
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> I don't understand why you think it's the loans' fault rather than the cultural impact of at least a century of everyone agreeing that higher education was worth it.
All else being the same, loans would remove the downward pressure of colleges to get spending under control by letting supply stay steady. Without loans we might see universities expand through building dorms and teaching facilities instead of new rec centers.
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Might not be about the popularity, the popularity is good, it's about the affordability.
The student loans were well intentioned, but just turning the money faucet on has significantly reduced practical concerns about pricing.
There are two sorts of campuses that have been *way* nicer than almost any corporate campus I've ever seen, medical and universities. In my day it was already pretty plush, and recently toured some and it's just gotten even more crazy, super large campus in the middle of some of the mo
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> A whole bunch of very rich assholes want you to think that you don't have any use for an education because they are tired of paying for it and because they don't want you to learn critical thinking skills. That's why you get at least two stories a week attacking education in your feed.
You get two stories a week because the current model of education we have is broken beyond repair, and to some extent, obsolete, and needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. You don't need to go away to a campus at a debt of six figures (or a cost of six figures to taxpayers) to get an education anymore. If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history. From the freely available works of the greatest minds in history to real time or recorded r
Re:College education is still worth it (Score:4, Insightful)
> If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history.
Yeah, go ahead and put "Didn't attend college, but I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, Reddit, and getting tutored by ChatGPT." on your resume and see how far that gets you. /s
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>> If anything, the Internet has revolutionized and democratized education to an extent undreamed of in human history.
> Yeah, go ahead and put "Didn't attend college, but I spent a lot of time reading Wikipedia, Reddit, and getting tutored by ChatGPT." on your resume and see how far that gets you. /s
There are already first-level companies that no longer require a degree for entry-level positions... Google among them. This is only going to accelerate. There will be more things like 3rd party certification programs that to some extent replace traditional degrees. Colleges can either adapt to this change, or be wiped out by it.
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Hell, back in the mid-90s software companies were poaching first-year students ("to get them before education ruins them"). And the O&G companies had to be bullied to stop taking kids at 16 who figured "hey, why finish high school when I can go straight to a six-figure oil rig job!" What they didn't tell the kids was "yeah, in a few years we'll punt you for the new up-and-comers, so hope you like being 25 with no education!"
Re: College education is still worth it (Score:1)
Socrates was executed because he did not want to teach in the Academy, but rather freelanced it under an olive tree for decades. Academia hasn't really changed in over 2000 years.
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Where did you get that idea? The Academy was founded in 387 BC by Plato, who was a student of Socrates and is responsible for most of what we know about him today. Socrates himself died in 399 BC (over a decade prior to its founding).
Even if you are referring to some predecessor institution to the famous Academy, there is no historical evidence that the refusal of Socrates to teach in a formal institution had anything to do with the charges against him. Pretty much every source indicates that it was related
Re: College education is still worth it (Score:1)
Pardon yes, the Lyceum was the school competing with Socrates. They sure didn't like him because of his annoying style of logic: A large number of simple sounding questions leading you off into a dubious direction, making you look stupid.
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The Lyceum (at least the capital "L" lyceum") was founded by Aristotle (a student of Plato) over 50 years after the Academy. There was a temple in that location that was often a gathering point for philosophical debate, but it wasn't a formal school prior to Aristotle.
The Socratic method can be vexing, but I think the core issue was that his instruction was seen as causing the youth to challenge the existing religious and political power structures. It's not that the leadership was embarrassed by Socratic d
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I think this is less about the value of college and more about disillusioned Gen Zers who can't understand why they're not pulling down a six figure income for their first job and not scoring dates with 10s on Tinder.
[1]Obligatory old CollegeHumor video. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP8lFWa_mg
You're being flippant and dismissive (Score:2)
A six-figure income today is enough to rent a decent apartment and maintain a okayish car.
I can tell you're an old man because you say six figure income when six figures isn't a lot of money.
I saw a joke that has really stuck with me, it's a wonderful Life is a timeless movie because it has the the line "do you know how long it takes a man to save $5,000"
Basically we have been screwing over the kids and they're feeling it. Pretty soon they're going to take away old people healthcare and social s
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You don't even live in the USA, so you really can't say, now, can you?
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You can always move to a low cost of living town... That's what I did 25 years ago to afford a house. I have an hour ride to work, but what can you do?
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> I think this is less about the value of college and more about disillusioned Gen Zers who can't understand why they're not pulling down a six figure income for their first job and not scoring dates with 10s on Tinder.
> [1]Obligatory old CollegeHumor video. [youtube.com]
There is a point to that. It is a mix of things. Having self esteem driven into them without having any real accomplishments, being told that having a degree - any degree - made them ubermenchen. Social expectations delivered to them that they had no boundaries, and Pop culture expectations that took a few young successful people, led many to believe that was the norm, that they deserved to have a big paycheck at their introductory level job, and have a meteoric rise to leadership positions almost immediat
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIP8lFWa_mg
preschool (Score:3)
Come to college, do preschool over again, same cost. We'll be playing with musical instruments and finger painting together later!
Zero coursework on teaching (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure "zero coursework on teaching" is accurate, but I'd ask what kind of doctoral program he attended that did not have significant TA orientation nor plenty of interaction with faculty leading the courses about didactics.
student loans needed easier bankruptcies with the (Score:3)
student loans needed easier bankruptcies with the banks & schools takeing part of the risk!
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Yes! Absolutely that. It's not a coincidence that tuition rates shot up after the bankruptcy rules were changed. Go figure, no accountability means abuse.
Education isn't a buffet (Score:4, Insightful)
Knowledge isn't sold to you. You buy access to it. You can only get out of "education" what you put into it.
Every person that thinks their education was a waste of time was probably right. They had no interest in learning, so they didn't. That's not the fault of higher education.
Going to college isn't a box you check, it's hard work you take on to further your goals in life. If 51% if these nimrods think they would be better off without it, they are factually too stupid for me to care about their opinion.
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> Going to college isn't a box you check, it's hard work you take on to further your goals in life.
You make it sound like we're living in Star Trek where money is no longer a thing and people just work to better themselves. Some people really do just want to see a few more zeros on their paycheck and who's to say that's less valid of a life goal?
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Directly suppressing the greedy is more trouble than it's worth, and carries nasty unintended consequences. Structuring social/financial/personal rewards to maximize benefit to the "commons" is both safer and more practical. For example, tax credits , custom sewage treatment and worker training could be provided to a tool-and-die machine shop, while a river-boat casino gets NO H1-B employees and is subject to weekly fire & food service inspections by agents with a bad attitude.
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>> Going to college isn't a box you check, it's hard work you take on to further your goals in life.
> You make it sound like we're living in Star Trek where money is no longer a thing and people just work to better themselves. Some people really do just want to see a few more zeros on their paycheck and who's to say that's less valid of a life goal?
And if you are really good at what you do, awesome - no problems. I will note that a degree isn't always the path to those extra zero's. In my own case, I didn't work in my actual field until after I retired and was offered a job I couldn't refuse.
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> and people just work to better themselves.
> Some people really do just want to see a few more zeros on their paycheck and who's to say that's less valid of a life goal?
No one said that. You're trying to split a hair here that doesn't exist.
It doesn't matter why you want more, only what effort you are willing to put in to obtain it.
*Going* to college isn't the goal, actually learning something valuable while you are there is.
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And if your goals aren't the selfish "have a good career" , "earn a lot" , "get the bitches"?
Education that prepares you for a corporate job isn't education, it's an indoctrination.
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> And if your goals aren't the selfish "have a good career" , "earn a lot" , "get the bitches"?
> Education that prepares you for a corporate job isn't education, it's an indoctrination.
You do know there are many other forms of employment that are not as you call them, corporate indoctrination.
I'm the CEO of a Charitable 501C3() (3) corporation that served the public good. Am I indoctrinated - you made a blanket statement.
I also work for an institution that is involved with a lot of money. I kind of assume you are extreme far left, if not, you might consider not having your posts imply that you are a Marxist/Leninist. Whatevs.
But here is the problem. There can be people who want to d
Education isn't about knowledge (Score:3)
if you go in to it thinking it is, or worse, wanting it to be, you will be very disappointed.
University sells you a bundle of services:
- Prefab peer collection - you get to pick friends/lovers/hopefully a partner from a pool of your supposed peers.
- Training to act like an adult while still adulting with training wheels.
- Somewhat related, but having time and space to explore who you want to be.
- Certification that you're capable of some professional acts that you will probably not use, but will ge
Re:Education is knowledge (Score:1)
You have the university experience very wrong. It IS about knowledge and is NOT about finding yourself. One serious intermediate STEM course will send you out the gate ( yes G-A-T-E ) a different person. Unless you are Einstein or Feynman your brain no longer functions as a natural man(woman) , but directs itself at the combinatorial North-star where irrelevant nuances are stratified. You hope for nothing; you just do the path integral. And after 4-years, you're fit to earn a living .....
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> Knowledge isn't sold to you. You buy access to it. You can only get out of "education" what you put into it.
> Every person that thinks their education was a waste of time was probably right. They had no interest in learning, so they didn't. That's not the fault of higher education.
> Going to college isn't a box you check, it's hard work you take on to further your goals in life. If 51% if these nimrods think they would be better off without it, they are factually too stupid for me to care about their opinion.
Can you do a dissertation on how say, a Gender Studies degree is worth the same amount as say, an EE degree?
Been my experiences that the Opinion degrees tend to not be as monetarily rewarding as those that take some serious study and application. Not for nothing, not everyone has the ability to be an electrical engineer, and certainly renumeration in ones career is likewise not a universal metric. Some people do things just for the love of it.
But some degrees offer one career path - you replace the pr
poorly trained instructors (Score:5, Interesting)
"My doctoral training included zero coursework in how to teach. That’s typical. Like most of my colleagues, I learned to teach through trial and error"
That sure does jibe with my college experience. The people teaching K-12 have actually been educated in the art. They are familiar with lesson and curriculum planning and how to introduce complex subjects in an understandable way. They have verbal and written communication skills that have been honed over the years, it is their profession.
That's rarely the case in most universities. The instructor may have a very good understanding of the subject material but no idea as to how to convey it. Many of my instructors could barely speak english. You learn from the textbooks or you fail.
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That is one reason to avoid large research institutions for undergraduate work. A small liberal arts school that emphasizes teaching does not have these issues. I don't recall any professors without native-level English proficiency and most were excellent at teaching. I also had very few textbooks. It was almost all primary sources curated by the professor.
This is because the school rewarded teaching over publications and research. Research is an important function of a university, but it's of limited benef
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The other problem is also to understand the WHY of things, not just how to do this or that, but to teach WHY you do things in one way and not another, even if you have multiple ways to get things done. If schools aren't teaching the ART of a subject, including in scientific subjects, they are skipping out on what makes many subjects fun for those who love it.
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College never helped you teach!
Multiple things and probably could be a book...
It was elite simply to be accepted and go; even if they dropped out later. Better, smarter, more innovative desirable workers who are generally less gullible. School helped make them but a large part was the selective nature of the process.
An adult who wants to learn who made it that far should already know how to learn well enough that no learning expertise is required! This is why there never was training in hand-holding educati
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> he instructor may have a very good understanding of the subject material but no idea as to how to convey it. Many of my instructors could barely speak english.
Yep. When I took an advanced calculus course, my instructors idea of teaching/lecturing was to read from the book in a (highly accented) monotone.
What the actual fuck??? (Score:3)
You don't get coursework for a doctoral. That's not how that works. You write a research paper and have peers review it.
What the hell is writing this crap? It's not somebody going through a doctoral program in teaching that's for sure...
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Most universities I interact with organizes workshops to train instructors and has money set aside for professional development of instructors
Universities tend to not care much abiut junior faculty getting trained in teaching. Because they want them to write papers and grant. Not teach atudents really.
And once their research goes down a little bit, the university wants them to focus more on teaching. But by then you have trained the faculty not to care.
It is sad really how poor incentive structure in univer
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> That's rarely the case in most universities. The instructor may have a very good understanding of the subject material but no idea as to how to convey it. Many of my instructors could barely speak english. You learn from the textbooks or you fail.
This is VERY different between institutions and levels of institution and majors. I went to a top 20 national university. I had one adjunct professor in 4 years (an English PhD student who taught a small 10-person freshman seminar).
I never had a teacher who was hard to understand. My Calc 3 teacher was German, but that was it. Every single computer science professor I had was native American or 100% fluent and clear in English.
My freshman 101 comp sci class had maybe 60 people, and that was the largest clas
If you want social connection (Score:1)
Form a social club
College is about training the mind
A combination of human professors and AI tutors seems best
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You learn a lot of other new things about life and what you really believe in by meeting new people with different ideas or participating in activities you never had an opportunity to previously. There's more to university than you what you get in the lecture hall or library (or the modern equivalent). Probably more so if you don't do it from your parent's basement!
I fully agree (Score:3)
Guess I'm prescient. I posted the below 10 days ago:
There's a lot more to college than just the academics. College is where you meet the friends you'll keep for life, and often your future spouse. Going from dormland to a shared house with friends as roommates is a gentle transition from living at home to being on your own. The social interaction isn't the bullshit of high school; this is where people start to develop the social skills of adults. At college you choose who you spend most of your time with. When working you spend time with the people your boss hired, like them or not. I think the experience of going to college is important for growth and wellness. And it's hell of a lot of fun too.
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The problem is that it's turning into a business. Catering to the customers; I have a relative that overly controlled their child - they are in a special pre-screened dorm and in a school within a school to keep her brat isolated from the lower classes. Ridiculous debt building dorms and amenities extending the sports insanity into everything.
NYU fired a prof for failing too many poor students who needed to fail; the brats and idiot administrators thought they were running a business and brats were customer
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Because an undergraduate professor was fired for failing too many students in some unknown discipline, you won't go to an NYU trained doctor? Does your judgment extend to NYU medical school or doctors who did their residency at an NYU-afficiated hospital? With this level of critical thinking, perhaps you should have been on that undergrad failure list.
And no one admits to the elephant (Score:3)
First, university education is not a monolith. Technical degrees from institutions that actually teach the subject matter have value - engineers still engineer, theoreticians still work out theory, these sorts of degrees and others have real value, even in the AI future.
Second, universities that teach 'soft' subjects, liberal arts, etc., have a more difficult value proposition. And it has been, at least at prestigious institutions, connection. That is, connection to the influential, the gatekeepers to profitable employment. In fact, it is more dependent on the prestige of the institution than the quality or caliber of education. Without choosing moral or political sides, influence, connection, prestige, access to the higher-paid careers.
Only that isn't working as well as it is sold. Certainly the institutions in next tier down have less and less to sell, and placement statistics show this. Much of this is the reality of corporate employment today, if you're not an NGO, government agency or affiliate, or political influencing entity, you got very little work to offer. The starting pay is lower, the career prospects dimmer, it's not good for the English Lit major unless they present something unique.
Connection to employment was always the driver. And connection to classmates used to be rungs on the career ladder. For the most recent generations, that is failing because they are not connecting to classmates. And this fellow classmate connection always was expected to become the future career connection, even if it was merely a reference.
This all points out a deeper problem. Recent generations of entry-level employees are too often socially inept. They have a hard time fitting in, and while it is popular sport on /. to rail about corporate ineptitude, immorality, and unethical existence, you should fit in before you go about remaking the corporation. Or, put more bluntly, you need to be in there to change from the inside. But the incoming generations are so inept that they are stalling their development, or worse, risking the process skipping them entirely. Just as we get reports of teaching degree programs that fail to teach how to teach, many business administration programs fail to teach how to get along. And you get bull in a china shop entry-level recruits that take a while to figure out what the game is, much less how to play it.
Connection? Well, a final note. University campuses have become battlegrounds, where the most innocent remark becomes a microaggression, the transgressor is expelled, and he perception of justice is the purpose of the institution. I don't advocate eliminating codes of conduct , but if universities cannot even employ due process and fair play, they are defective. No wonder they are making their student bodies into islands.
Re: And no one admits to the elephant (Score:1)
Same situation in Europe. The guys who built my house all had university degrees and the electrician had a masters degree in something. The two guys who came to clean up our garden and prune the trees also had degrees - the boss guy had a masters in botany - the only one with a degree that was applicable to his job.
Re: And no one admits to the elephant (Score:2)
Your landscaper having a degree in botany makes a little bit of sense. At least in Europe where they value quality. Not that you don't get good landscaping in America, but the equation is slightly different
Wut? (Score:2)
There are two parts to this Culture and education. No doubt I'll anger some people, but here we go.
Colleges played an integral part in the incredible lack of connection he decries.
Because right now, they are pretty darn toxic.
He speaks of a "Loneliness epidemic". It certainly is true, there is one. But that atmosphere that has been created doesn't help a bit. As the female to male ratio has been increasing, there are less men available, and the ease with which a man can be destroyed plays some part in
It Was Never About the Content (Score:2)
We didn't need AI or even the modern internet to understand that the raw content of the coursework was never the reason why people were willing to pay large sums of money for college. Good Will Hunting in the 1990s had a famous quote about everything learned at a fancy college being accessible with a library card.
What people pay for are two things:
1) The brand of the institution to certify that the student has completed a course of study
2) The social network afforded by attendance
Some students may learn bet
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AN ELITE SOCIAL NETWORK. Also an elite brand too...
Idiotocracy needed a scene for this... a flashback for the retarded lawyer's education.
There is a value there even if it is just social/political in nature. The education at Harvard is not likely better than anywhere else. Same textbooks...hit or miss professors. I knew one who hated students and was an ass to the grad students that did his job. Reality is that somebody like that should just be a researcher who is a jerk to coworkers who are PhD students bu
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What's with ELITE ?! That Harvard prof who hates students might be one-of-three people in the world who deeply understand their subject Books ... any books or the average PhD know about 10% of the hard-stuff, though they are mathematical athletes. I believe Socrates 1st proved this ... and hemlock was his reward. So don't go around in public, saying I need this one transvestite/fascist/Rando-Marxist dark-faced white-livered Columbia drug runner to teach me what's next with quasi-deSitter spaces. You will en
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Aristotle famously declared that "man is a social animal." So are Chimpanzees.
For better or worse, humans have used educational institutions as a social sorting device. That may be collectively stupid, but it's not stupid for an individual seeking to maximize social status (and the attendant benefits) to play the game.
Instruction is not the most valuable element (Score:2)
Instruction is everywhere, and you can get instruction from a free book from the library. The value comes from A) the selection of what content is MOST important to learn, and B) assessment and certification of your learning, so you have feedback on your progress and can have evidence of your knowledge and skills and abilities for those who wish to employ you.
AI may have some efficiencies to learning (although those efficiencies all come by stealing content from others who created it), but it will never e
Loneliness? This will get laughed at, (Score:2)
but at UC Davis the square dance club was fun and you met fun people.
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> at UC Davis the square dance club was fun and you met fun people
Yes, it does sound fun. The problem is that there's no reason such a club *must* be run through a college or university. Your local YMCA, community recreation / parks department, community center, church, etc. can all just as easily run social clubs and activities at a much lower cost than colleges or universities.
Doubling down on social activities is not a solution for "saving" colleges and universities (and I don't agree they are broken and need saving; education is often a punching bag for all bad thin
Two "root causes" overlooked. (Score:2)
When it comes to "dollar value for the degree," that's easily fixed by restoring Federal funding to the pre-Reagan model.
So far as this professor's new ideas, he and we need to remember that there is absolutely no "one size fits all" method of education. Options have to be available.
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I don't think his ideas are new. It looks to me like everything he suggests has already been done, and the end result has been college education becoming more expensive and less valuable. They do hire "experience designers" (whoever invented that term deserves a punch), and they overspend on amenities to the detriment of academia's actual purpose.
Strange times we're living in (Score:2)
It used to be that you didn't have to encourage or provide resources for young people to hang out together while at university, they did so naturally. The main concern used to be to stop or at least to limit the drunkenness, drug use, noise and various public disturbances as they did so. Certainly there were people who didn't fit the whole partying student stereotype but they were more of an exception.
But yeah, you won't be paying the ridiculous tuition fees and getting in massive debt for the rest of your
*Colleges* oversold it? (Score:2)
Let's see, it was The Thing after WWII.
Then, esp. during and after the ninties, HR departments *DEMANDED* more and more degrees and certifications... unwarrantedly.
I finished all the computer classes at my community college, and got my first job programming before getting my degree. Try that now. "Oh, you don't have a four year degree, and no certification for Oracle, and you don't have 10 years experience with rust for this entry-level job".
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I'm pretty sure it became "The Thing" during Vietnam, when it was "The Thing" that kept you out of the draft, not "The Thing" that taught you and got you ready for a career.
And who was it that made those HR decisions you're talking about? The people who went to college during the Vietnam era.
No, wrong (Score:2)
they have wasted money on things not relating to education. If they could cut costs, then more people would be interested. It doesn't make as much financial sense for someone to go to school. Would you spend +60k/yr to get a job for sub 100k?
connection? (Score:1)
In other words, early 20s folks are graduating with no skills and no human connections but we're going to give up on educating them.
Um, I dunno... (Score:2)
I'm by no means an expert, but I doubt the ability of modern universities to teach community in any meaningful, successful way. This seems like a course correction that's way too late, enacted by the same people responsible for the original problem.
They already tried that -- our ultra-woke (or whatever they're calling it these days) hard left sociology largely came from universities. They've already created a social community. One that did not work. How are the same people going to now teach a society t
So, sell it as a party instead? No. (Score:2)
We already have Arizona State.
We don't need to make kids mortgage their futures for them to make friends. This is a stupid, stupid idea from someone way dumber than he has been led to believe.
Come to think of it, didn't this already happen? They changed how dorms are designed in a way that enhances socialization but hampers learning. They keep adding social amenities that provide distractions instead of education. They've hired people to make things more fun instead of making learning better. I'm
Make Universities Religous Again? (Score:2)
What Dr. Anicich describes was the norm before Universities became secular: they were centered on a religious experience with social gathering and rituals which built both community and communal values. As they became secular they slowly but inevitably became disconnected from religious mores and values.
Connection is not a sufficient end point for Universities to sustain themselves. They need a mission and purpose that is more than just self-serving nonsense which is driving them now.
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Putting scientists on trial for contradicting the church was also common before Universities became secular.
Brandolini's Law is in Effect - Too Much BS (Score:2)
This article is so full of cherry-picked bullshit that I would expect a 3rd-year undergrad wrote it to be edgy. I can't get to everything, so here's the lowdown on the cost of education.
Colleges didn't "oversell" education. If the well-wishers of the world had their way, we would ALL be college educated because educated people tend to make better decisions and be less horrible to each other. The value of education is extreme. PARENTS oversell specific careers to their and in consequence mandate their childr
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You sound pretty bitter. Why don't you move to europe? Germany for instance recognizes that college is important: they actually pay for it. Even foreigners can go to university for free.
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> You're more likely to get your life ruined by a guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual harassment accusation than finding a mate "for life"
The number of truly false accusations against men (or women) for sexual harassment or sexual assault is very, very small, and, if you think about it, no larger for those who attend college than those who don't.
> US colleges now trying to be "places of connection" for young men has to be the biggest joke of todays age of misandry and man-bashing
Is it "man-bashing" to simply ask men to not be so rapey? Sheesh.
There are plenty of masculine places on college campuses. The most popular college sport literally involves men bashing their heads into each other over and over again. If you want to do something masculine with a group of others who a
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>> You're more likely to get your life ruined by a guilty-until-proven-innocent sexual harassment accusation than finding a mate "for life"
> The number of truly false accusations against men (or women) for sexual harassment or sexual assault is very, very small, and, if you think about it, no larger for those who attend college than those who don't.
Then there is absolutely zero problem. The falsely accused are of no importance, mere collateral damage in reshaping society.
We are blessed to see that false accusations hardly exist, and when it happens, it is inconsequential.
Except perhaps to the person whose life is destroyed.
Your post reminds me of a local Dentist who was accused of Rape of one of his patients. He was utterly destroyed. She claimed he sedated her, took her to her home and raped her.
He went on trial, and as it turned out, they
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How much of this is simply shopping for pockets of male privilege ?
Take heart boys, you can hold your own on a level playing field if you take advantage of learning opportunities
AI Tutor (Score:3)
I wish they had linked to the study, this sounds like great news though, and I see no reason why the Universities can't use the best of both approaches to include even more content into an undergraduate degree
How about re-envisioning college entirely? (Score:2)
As I suggested in 2008 in "Post-Scarcity Princeton":
[1]https://pdfernhout.net/reading... [pdfernhout.net]
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D
[1] https://pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
undergraduate degree now takes 5-6 years and we pu (Score:2)
undergraduate degree now takes 5-6 years and we pushing for the loan rules to allow this added time.
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Your example has not even been published, and includes Harvard students (clearly not a random sample of all college students), and uses an AI tool that was carefully prompted and designed by the faculty members teaching the course.
Yes, AI has potential to provide individualization and interaction with students, but it is not, at least for the foreseeable future, going to be something where we can just "turn over" learning or teaching to AI.
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Would you prefer an AI tutor that doesn't have any idea about the course? Of course you design prompts to match the curriculum.
Somehow people always assume AI would be magic, you just ask about ANYTHING and get the correct answer. No, you need to use it correctly. If you want an AI tutor, it should know the lecture, exercises and possibly the exercise solutions.
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I think it was subsequently published here: [1]https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
AI replacing profs wholesale is a terrible idea...Duolingo anyone?
But I agree with this quote from the paper:
"Although passive lectures are among the least effective modes of instruction, they remain in wide use in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. [...] Active learning pedagogies, such as peer instruction, small-group activities, or a flipped classroom structure, have demonstrated significant im
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-97652-6