I'm a professor at a regional university. Not a big name school, but we have about 5,000 students. We would be bankrupt if we told students we'd only be offering classes online this fall because students, by an overwhelming majority, want the in-person experience. We know we would lose enrollment if we went fully online this fall, and the drop would be significant enough for the university to declare bankruptcy. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other big names have enough reputation and big enough endowments to weather a storm of a temporary drop in enrollment due to shifting instruction online. Many universities cannot.
Man, this is very tough. I think the problem is (and I very much hope I am wrong!) that an outbreak will occur and your university will still have the financial problems. And also some more sick and dead people.
(All from a US perspective)
There's been a crazy notion floating around from the start on this, that we can either keep our normal activities/economy (jobs, businesses, schools, etc) or deal with the pandemic.
However, you can't have anything normal unless the pandemic is under control. Because until it is, so many kinds of normal activities will be hit by an outbreak, and then your normal activity will fall apart and stop.
I think we could have had school this fall. But it would have meant much more serious efforts months ago, building up our fast testing capabilities, a commitment to ongoing mask, social distancing, and other mechanisms to control the spread (mandates, really).
Nope, even with 100% lockdown, it still spreads because we aren’t an island country. It even got to Auckland now, through freight! You can only delay the inevitable (unless a vaccine is developed in the next few months)
You will have spread no matter what you do. The question is how much.
If prevalence of the virus is high, then the risk of spread is higher. At a high level of prevalence any systematically repeating and mixing groupings of people (such as school) is pretty much guaranteed to lead to an outbreak, which will stop or at least seriously disrupt and hinder that system (not to mention the sick and dead people from the outbreak).
At a low level or prevalence outbreaks will still occur, but only here and there. Some schools will have outbreaks and have to stop, but most will be able to keep going.
Widely available tests with fast turnaround is also part of this because it allows outbreaks to be detected earlier, when they are much smaller, which limits the disruption each outbreak causes (not to mention the deaths and sickness).
The point of all this is to have most of our normal activities and economy until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available.
Did they confirm this? I could also see issues with someone asymptomatic who was quarantined, but was at the 99th percentile for incubation period. With an R0 near 1, with enough people, you could miss the virus for even a few months.
It's really hard to contain, and NZ will likely be dealing with case like this on and off until there's a vaccine.
I have two kids attending college this fall, one at the state "flagship" school, and the other at a regional college. Both are dead certain, as are their friends, that college will last a couple weeks, then they'll send everybody home. It will happen just in time for nobody to be prepared for it. The kids are all signing up for online classes whenever possible.
My dental hygienist, whom I spoke to this week, has a daughter at one of the community colleges, in a transfer program where she does 2 years at the CoCo and then gets admitted to one of the state colleges to finish her degree. All of her classes are online. She's delighted with it. She takes classes at home while also caring for her little sister, while Mom works.
Honestly, if I were graduating and attending college this year, I'd just skip this semester, and possibly the year. Online education isn't the same, and most universities are ill prepared to offer online instruction at the same level as in class instruction.
I'm in my senior year of college. I seriously considered doing exactly what you're suggesting.
I would much rather just suck it up and enter the workforce at this point. I don't know what I'd do with myself for the year, and I don't have enough credits to speedrun my degree in the spring. There's also some conflicting information about if I would keep my financial aid. I haven't taken the time to dig into it, because at that point I decided it wasn't worth it.
Something I feel isn't being acknowledged with online education is that brick and mortar schools are the worst people to be doing it. Traditional colleges have staffing levels geared around physical limitations after all. Assuming you can make online-only work even kind've well, won't it mean that staff who share course modules are suddenly redundant as a concept? I get that that's not bad in the efficiency sense but if you can run a college without the brick, mortar, and seating requirements, then why would anyone ever hire the same number of master and phd level academics when you could have people specialized in communicating the material following modules designed by a subset of the people in the mid and upper echelons of academia? It seems like if we ever get online-only working what we're going to see is a mass consolodation of high level programs.
I agree that universities should do more to control costs. I'll push back just a bit that trimming all "fat" would make universities better. Where I am, the "fat" proposed for trimming is support for study abroad, music education, research conferences, and other things that enrich the lives of students and (hopefully) benefit society as a whole.
That’s sad, since that seems more flesh that fat to me.
The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
The fundamental problem is that music teachers tend to care about music, while administrators tend to care about protecting their own jobs. So any budget cuts tend to cut services, rather than reducing the overhead. This dynamic plays out everywhere with overgrown middle management.
Music teachers care about their jobs just as much as administrators. It's just that administrators make the big decisions and they care about their jobs more than the jobs of others.
As far as students are concerned, a bigger problem than administrator pay is professors who are more interested in teaching than research, and even when professors are interested in teaching, they might not be good teachers.
$250,000 per year administrators, $30 million dollar buildings and "lazy rivers". If we had a statistic for what percentage of your buildings were for academic usage, you'd find the amount is low.
"Paying for the Party" is a neat book here based on real life information from colleges.
I work as a professor at the University of South Carolina.
I suspect that my employer, as well as similar universities, will be more-or-less okay.
To be sure, there will be pain. Faculty hiring, for example, will take a huge hit -- I feel bad for everyone finishing up grad school and postdocs now, and who was anticipating hitting the academic job market.
In addition, there might be layoffs of tenured faculty, and/or closure of programs like history which are deeply worth preserving but which don't generate the big bucks. You might see a lot of sports get cut -- think swimming, wrestling, golf, etc. -- not the sort which get broadcast on TV. This already happened at Stanford.
But my estimation is that we, and similar universities, do not face an existential threat. Hopefully I'm right.
The schools that are most screwed are small, non-prestigious liberal arts colleges -- most of which are not very well known. Indeed, there were already a number of such closures before the pandemic hit.
It's definitely an existential threat to the system. The reason unis might survive are 1) government aid direct and indirect 2) Unis have otherwise heavily incumbent positions and the banks will provide money, maybe on ugly terms.
Most colleges are panicking right now, this is not the kind of situation they are in any way equipped to handle.
> I'm curious: under what conditions do you think the threat to Carolina (and other similar regional flagship schools) becomes "existential"?
In my opinion, when long-term demand for a traditional university education shows signs that it will significantly decline.
I just don't think we've seen it yet. (Nor have we seen severe short-term decline in demand. Enrollment is down less than I was expecting.) There are a variety of competitors such as edX, Coursera, etc., as well as university-affiliated "startups" such as SNHU's massive online program. For the most part they haven't caught on that much, and I don't think they will.
As tuition keeps rising, it will squeeze out smaller, less prestigious, and more expensive private schools that offer (in my opinion) questionable value for money. But I'd expect many of these students to choose state schools instead.
All this said, I don't have all that much insider knowledge, just strong opinions. :)
Thanks for the insight - sounds like we have a similar perspective to the `covid+higher_education` (as well as the the health of `higher_education` in general).
Cheers, again. I always forget that their might be other people from SC on this board. It's refreshing to be reminded.
Stanford cancelling on-campus education definitely feels like a major bellwether. It's hard to think of any school better positioned to make it work. Not just because of its wealth and elite status, but because the climate is so aggressively warm and non-rainy, and the spacious campus absolutely has the space (though perhaps not the seating/tables, at least initially) to accommodate all-outdoor classes and activities.
Stanford and a number of the well positioned universities can weather the storm, which is why the are cancelling in person after hoping not to. https://www.profgalloway.com/uss-university
As with everything related to the pandemic, it kills the smaller competitors making those who will survive, schools like Stanford, Harvard, businesses like apple and google, have an even greater market dominance than before.
Apple and Google would be happy to have everybody in the world as their customer.
Stanford and Harvard, while offering some non-selective continuing ed / MOOC programs that leverage their name, are not looking to increase their enrollment for traditional degrees. Their exclusivity is part of their appeal.
Not everyone, most classes are still online, and if you want you can not take any in person classes, even for lower tuition. Many of my friends are opting to stay home next semester.
Another interesting detail is the mandatory twice-a-week testing for anybody who will be on campus (and of course, mandatory facemasks). If you're going to have people on campus that's probably the safest way to do it
Sucks because students are signing leases, moving crap, buying meal plans, etc, right now.
This is the whole reason schools want students back. They’re desperate to recover some of this cash flow. They have huge budgets and vast numbers of administrative staff to pay. Without the revenue from residence leases and meal plans, they’re in real trouble.
The value offered by colleges is not just an education. It is 4 years of living away from home experiencing whatever floats your boat ( frats, independence, parties, sports, friends, etc... ). There is virtually no demand for online only classes above a 5k/year price point.
There is a similar situation with private schools. Some of the demand comes from the fact that it is also a babysitting service, forced social group, networking opportunity for parents.
I've come to the conclusion that this is what most parents and students are looking for...a [relatively] safe place to finish growing up. The degree is only part of the equation.
I feel this is the consequence of the American style no responsibilities system. Why on earth should an 18 year old high school senior need a hall-pass to go to the restroom?
Signed a Swede who spent an exchange year in Texan upper middle class suburban public high school.
When I tell people that Finnish middle schools don’t have bells and the kids just go places when they need to they look at me in disbelief. Kids live up to the expectations they are given. The patronizing nature of the American education system is one of the reasons why people here have such a hard time taking personal responsibility for things in my opinion.
Same in Sweden, essentially starting in second grade for me.
Thinking back on it I now see how thought out it was. The clock facing the school yard which everything depended on. In second and third grade every time it was PE, shop class or something requiring a different place than the homeroom it was scheduled so the teacher would bring the class if necessary, later just letting us go. Fourth and fifth it could be right after a break trusting us to get there on our own.
Then starting sixth grade we were essentially on our own. The first class started anywhere between from 8 to 10 in the assigned room. During breaks we could go anywhere, the only limit being to get back in time. Sometimes having gaps in the schedule leading to some time to kill. Often going the public library, or playing something, or hanging out in the school building or buying coke and mentos because kids....
Then choosing high school and field of study based on interests all over town getting there using public transportation, which every student that had to travel longer than a couple of kilometers is given a pass for which is valid during school hours.
Also getting the government stipend of ~$100 every month having to learn manage your own money.
Wow, this was a trip down memory lane.
One thing I vividly remember is feeling like a child again when starting American high school. A contrasting memory which stands out is during lunch getting in a friend's truck sneaking out to buy fast food for lunch and "stealthily" avoiding the parking lot monitors to not get into trouble. Wtf.
It is 4 years of living away from home experiencing whatever floats your boat ( frats, independence, parties, sports, friends, etc... )
I’m in university right now. I just finished a term of online classes. I’ve definitely witnessed those benefits being enjoyed by other students but I haven’t had the time to enjoy them myself; my program is simply too difficult for that. The most I’ve enjoyed is going out for drinks with friends once a week, and maybe the occasional meal out on another night.
The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes. Either that or they’re already so rich and privileged that they can afford to fail courses and keep going.
> The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes. Either that or they’re already so rich and privileged that they can afford to fail courses and keep going.
You'd be surprised. Unless you're with someone 24/7 you actually don't know what else they are doing. I knew a girl in college who you might think partied all the time. I mean, she was always out and about, so makes sense. Except, the few people who knew her better got to see her literally study for 24 straight hours by sleeping 15-20 minutes here and there, slam a diet mountain dew on the way to class and ace the test. These were non-trivial classes, and she graduated with a 4.0 by the way.
Was this a healthy way to go through college? I don't think so. It certainly was not how I did it. But it did show me a level of effort around studying/working I didn't think was possible, and also that what people do in private will surprise you.
>The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes. Either that or they’re already so rich and privileged that they can afford to fail courses and keep going.
I disagree completely. Some people are just inhumanly capable of balancing everything. One of the smartest people I met while in school was in a sorority and partied hard. She was also extremely successful academically and is currently attending medical school.
I also had my share of fun, but I would never have been able to keep up with her. Fortunately my academic ambitions don't go much farther than my BS in comp. sci.
Just because you can't manage the balancing act doesn't mean no one else can.
I disagree completely. Some people are just inhumanly capable of balancing everything. One of the smartest people I met while in school was in a sorority and partied hard. She was also extremely successful academically and is currently attending medical school.
She’s the exception that proves the rule. I met at least half a dozen people in first year who partied only moderately and have since flunked out of the school. They’ve moved to other schools with less demanding programs and tried to put their lives back together.
I also met someone who studied for an entire term to pass the MCAT and got into medical school. She seemed like the type of person who really knew how to balance her life though. Not a crazy partier but someone with close friendships.
I think both you and she are near opposite ends of a fairly normal distribution. Yes, she's an outlier (not as much as you seem to think though), but your description of your experience is as well.
When I was in college from 2002 to 2006, the thing I heard about sororities was that joining one usually helped a GPAs, and they were really good about keeping an archive of old exams and notes.
> The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes.
Not true at all. Perhaps they may not end up with the best GPA but they'll do good enough to get a useful degree while having a strong network. It may not have been the healthiest lifestyle for the time being, but they made it out fine.
Source: A large part of my college social circle who ended up in fruitful STEM/consulting/medicine careers.
If someone didn’t have to commute or work a lot of hours in a part time job, they should have more than enough time to do those things while studying enough. Or maybe they prefer to hit the gym, there are lots of options.
You don't have to be in a frat to have the "college experience", but you should explore interests outside of your direct course of study and meet new people. I think you will regret it if you just keep your nose down the whole time, whether or not its right you are paying for much more than classes. Given a second chance I would follow this advice :)
> The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes. Either that or they’re already so rich and privileged that they can afford to fail courses and keep going.
I don't know why you're assuming this, but I'm a little insulted. I was an NCAA athlete and a common refrain I always heard was that the most valuable skill you get from it is incredible time management. I didn't kill time on sites like HN or reddit or facebook (the only social network at the time). We partied a decent amount too. About half of the particular people I played and partied with now have doctorates from world class institutions. Nearly all of us have STEM degrees.
this reminds me of the scene in the movie Booksmart where the nerdy girls who did nothing but study and work towards their academic dreams found out all the "dumb" party kids also got into top tier schools while also having fun.
It's staggering to me how much people will publicly support government subsidized partying and friend making. At least in the past it felt like people pretended it was about education.
I attended a private college. Not only did I have to live on campus for all four years, but additionally, they forced you to purchase the meal plan. I made most of my meals myself; nonetheless, I had no choice but to pay for the meal plan.
>I fully expect a notable outbreak in some college to start a wave of media, followed by all the universities sending everyone back home again.
If you are referring to the USA, I disagree. Unless the local county health departments or states require schools to go virtual, I don't see it.
If a large public university experiences an outbreak, I don't think they will go virtual until someone dies. I do not think large private schools will go virtual unless the government requires it.
The USA has no centralized method of handling the pandemic, so each state is making their own rules and guidelines. We have professional sports teams playing outside bubbles and many college football programs are continuing.
Many school districts outside urban areas are opening and seeing outbreaks, but continue to stay open. As a country, we blew it and seem to have decided to go about this piecemeal.
US state universities have been very risk averse for more than 30 years now. Try to buy or even consume alcohol on campus these days. The story was very different before about 1990, when inebriated students wobbled about campus undeterred with drinks in hand.
When covid case counts mount on campus, there will be huge pressure from media and concerned parents to quash the threat instantly -- something impossible to do without extensive 24 hour PCR testing already being in place, which no school will have.
All it will take is images of one pretty cheerleader on a ventilator to instantly change policy for an entire region and all the schools therein. If enough parents lose faith, school will be out indefinitely.
"Along with student death, these triggers to campus closure include “significant actions” by the governor or other public officials, sharply diminished hospital capacity, testing shortages on campus and unmanageable, widespread clusters of cases."
>My experience has been that schools cave pretty fast in the face of media pressure.
Before now I would agree with you. From what has been reported schools in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Indiana are staying open after large outbreaks. These are elementary and high schools, so maybe it'll be different with universities.
This is my biggest concern. They’re going to charge students full price, force them on campus along with all the expense that entails, and once the bursar’s office is sufficiently flush send them all home again.
Considering every college in America takes federal student loan money this seems like a really easy place for the federal government to take decisive action to force a semester online and cap charges for the benefit of students and the federal budget.
It's absurd here in my state as well. We have peak number of cases in one of the biggest college towns, and students are moving in as we speak. I give it two or three weeks before we cancel everything again.
As an aside, equally scummy are universities that pulled the rug from under students very close to move in. My sister got kicked out of her housing by the university a few days before move in, and basically had to accept that she would be staying home for the fall, as rent prices near school nearly doubled overnight.
> as rent prices near school nearly doubled overnight.
Wait is that really what happened? I anticipated that rent prices would drop because most students would just go home and there wouldn't be a market for people wanting to live in the college part of town.
The kids likely don’t care. Their age group is largely unharmed by coronavirus, so the option to be near their friends, partying, and not living at home is probably pretty appealing.
I hate to be all like "to be fair" but wouldn't it have been even worse if they'd waited until after she moved there and then sent her home and made her move twice instead of canceling a move once?
Do you mean they're still having in-person classes required but are just not offering housing? That's definitely scummy, that's the kind of thing that would have changed people's admission acceptance decisions.
Some in person classes, yes. My sister luckily only has online ones. Regarding when, I think the obvious answer should have been to cancel in person classes back in may or June.. We knew covid was here to last even then.
Are you in Pennsylvania because that sounds exactly like my experience. I'm extremely thankful that I graduated long ago and don't have children or relatives having to deal with this.
If you are a freshman or sophomore and you have a modicum of self-discipline and motivation, it can be a great strategy. You know those core courses at which you want to excel but will suck up most your time? Do you realize how much easier they will be if you’ve already read the textbook twice over and listened to an online lecture course or two? Maybe even audited an actual online course from another university? Maybe found out what the assignments will be and did most of them. A C in the online audited course at a community college will lead to an A when you actually take it next year and with half the effort. If you get through as much of this year’s core course material as you can stand, keep on going with next year’s courses. "Finish" organic chem the first half-year? "Do" biochem the second. If you nail half the concepts before you take the course, you can focus on the other concepts during the course. Professors start noticing you because you did so well. You bring up advanced topics in conversations and get invited to work in the lab. You get a good rep and the benefit of the doubt. Bonus tip: find a professor whose support you’d like to have and read some of their recent papers or watch their presentations. Contact them with good questions about their work. Free time is an amazing ally if you use it right.
No, I’m not an Asian tiger mom...wrong gender, wrong ethnicity.
And do what? Get a job? go traveling? This would be a fucking awful time to take a gap year, the fact that this seems to be the prevailing solution on here is indicative of just how out of touch some of the readership is.
Then next year you’re trying to matriculate with the current class plus all the people from your class that skipped a year.
I’m not saying people should go to school. I wouldn’t if I were this age. But it’s not exactly as simple as peacing out for a year and then coming back. It will be a huge mess.
>Sucks because students are signing leases, moving crap, buying meal plans, etc, right now. Aside from the obvious safety issues.
Follow the money.
The colleges are getting paid regardless. The local landlords, businesses, etc. that usually get to skim easy money off college students don't. The colleges have to walk the line between screwing the students by giving them all covid (bad press -> less money) and pissing off the locals, who will just use their voting power to use the local government to take money (less favorable regulator environment -> less money) from the colleges if the colleges don't let them skim enough gravy.
My theory is that the semester will be shut down just in time for nobody to get their money back (where students otherwise would have taken a gap year or something). Maybe I'm just cynical.
Leases seem like the worst aspect of this, at least a return flight is only half a month's rent (one would hope).
I agree that you are correct about this, even here in Boston we've just got so many colleges that even if the one I work at has no problems Boston in general seems likely to have a big enough uptick that it will impact everyone. That's a lot of students traveling here by plane all at once and even if they're quarantining when they arrive I bet their parents aren't...
I'm convinced I nearly died during my first semester. Swine flu, pneumonia and a throat infection all in the course of a month. Anyone who thinks this won't spread through a college doesn't have a clue.
Yup, both of my kids are in college, at different schools, and pretty much everybody fully expects that school will last for a couple weeks, then they'll send everybody home. The savvy ones are signing up for exclusively online courses.
You have no reason to believe that their son wants to be there in person. The son may share their parents' safety concerns
And claiming that coronavirus poses "no danger" is simply untrue. You can claim that the danger is over-stated, but young adults can and do get COVID-19
True, but while infected with mild (or no) symptoms, they may also unknowingly spread it to university employees, townsfolk, or their parents while visiting for the weekend.
So even assuming that the personal danger is acceptable (which isn't a given; 300 deaths sounds like a horrible and avoidable tragedy to me) death figures among healthy 20-somethings don't capture the full risk of keeping a university open.
"So even assuming that the personal danger is acceptable (which isn't a given; 300 deaths sounds like a horrible and avoidable tragedy to me) death figures among healthy 20-somethings don't capture the full risk of keeping a university open."
Well now you're shifting the goalposts.
The comment was that the students are at risk. Someone shows you that they're not at risk, and you pivot to danger to "townsfolk".
Here's the thing: those students don't just disappear, and they don't stop interacting with other college-aged students, townsfolk and employees simply because they're not at school. And if you want to protect parents, shipping their kids off to live on their own seems like a better way to do that than to have those kids living at home.
(As far as "avoidable tragedies" go: during the same period that those 300 kids died of covid, literally thousands died of all other causes. More died of accidents than died of Covid. I think it's time to admit that your sense of concern is mis-calibrated.)
> The comment was that the students are at risk. Someone shows you that they're not at risk, and you pivot to danger to "townsfolk".
Assuming they're not stupid, evil, or politically conservative, the students are probably concerned about the risk of spreading the illness and the attendant harm that could cause, as well as what it could do to themselves.
This argument seems strange to me. Only 300 people have died because of the policies that were put in place. Relaxing those policies will increase that number.
Now there could be debate about whether that new number is "acceptable" or not. But we shouldn't use the success of the quarantine-like policies to argue that quarantine-like policies are unnecessary.
"Only 300 people have died because of the policies that were put in place. Relaxing those policies will increase that number."
This is an assumption, and it's a bad one. The paucity of deaths in young people is true around the world, regardless of lockdown policy. Sweden, for example, does not have a higher proportion of young people dying.
Yes, it is an assumption. Unfortunately, this situation is unprecedented, so everything we do has to be an educated guess. I would also note that you followed it up with an assumption of your own ;)
It is well established that physical distancing limits the spread of virus transmitted via respiratory droplets. If you refute that, I would require significant peer-reviewed literature on your side. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
It is also irrefutable that contracting COVID-19 carries risk - especially for high-risk individuals with comorbidities (yes, even young people)
Combined, I don't see how you can come up with a hypothesis where getting people together would somehow be equally as safe as keeping people apart.
Again, this is just one aspect that policy makers have to consider. There is also the economy, mental health, etc. I think having those discussions is very interesting - how much should we protect our health vs our way of life? There are very valid arguments against continuing the shut-down.
But acknowledging that social practices directly impact virus transmission is a necessary step to have meaningful discussion.
> It is well established that physical distancing limits the spread of virus transmitted via respiratory droplets. If you refute that, I would require significant peer-reviewed literature on your side.
The study you provided does not support your claim that physical distancing works as it is implemented in the US (6 feet of separation).
> We found that the evidence base for current guidelines is sparse, and the available data do not support the 1- to 2-meter (≈3–6 feet) rule of spatial separation. Of 10 studies on horizontal droplet distance, 8 showed droplets travel more than 2 meters (≈6 feet), in some cases up to 8 meters (≈26 feet).
It's also likely Covid is spread by aerosols. There needs to be more research but it is very likely based on the details of superspreader events.
500 children die of influenza in the US each year. COVID is far less of a threat to young people. We have to make tradeoffs and having kids in college and not at home with parents and grandparents is a good solution
The CDC estimates total deaths from influenza in 2019 was 34,200.[0]
173,000 people have died in the USA this year from Covid 19 and the toll is rising.[1] that’s more than the total number of cases (22,000) in Australia. We got 10% the population of the USA and 0.2% of the deaths.
With all due respect, the USA has the worst Covid 19 rates in the entire fucking world. It is a travesty. You guys can say what you like, but your plan is literally killing people.
And specifically to your point: Do you think kids teach themselves? Kids are part of families, kids are taught by adults, kids catch busses driven by adults, kids meals are cooked by adults. The death rate of kids is irrelevant. Since kids can still spread the disease, they should be isolated like everyone else.
You have the highest absolute death rate and the 8th highest rate per capita. Do you realise your list is literally the list of worst hit countries in the world?
Look a bit further down... Australia 17.2, Vietnam 0.26, Thailand 0.84, New Zealand 4.5. Indonesia, with a comparable population to the USA but far more densely populated - and far poorer - is just 23.9.
The USA, richest country in the world, reserve currency of the world, has the 8th worse death rate in the whole world. That is vile. Meanwhile, your moron in chief is pointing to New Zealand and saying it’s out of control there because they had an “outbreak” of 9 cases. 9!
That’s roughly how many new cases the USA has every 18 seconds.
There is no excuse for what’s happened in the USA.
Was he obese? I only ask because many of the younger patients have comorbities that make them vulnerable to many diseases. And vaccines don't work as well for the obese either.
But also the college students probably aren't interested in policing the cafeteria in an attempt to reduce the 600,000+ deaths from heart disease every year.
> I fully expect a notable outbreak in some college to start a wave of media noise, followed by all the universities sending everyone back home again.
I'd be surprised if that happened. Stanford's in a heavily populated part of California. It might make sense for them, based on the student population (mostly rich or at least well off) and location. My university has plans to keep students in campus housing even if we're forced to go 100% online, and I think from a public health perspective, that's a good thing. You don't want college students moving around if you have an outbreak. And once they're home, they're definitely not going to all just sit in the basement - they'll still be going to bars and parties. That would be a disaster. And the only place that there's hope they'll be tested or interact with others that are tested is on campus.
> My son's state university is forcing students to return in person.
That's horrible. As much as possible, we're accommodating students that feel safer online. About the only way I could see someone being forced to return is if their remaining credits were a lab science class. The worst thing you can possibly do is increase the density on campus. Everyone here is encouraged to work off campus as much as possible. Many of our courses are online or hybrid, where you reserve the in-person interactions for the parts where it delivers real value over the alternative. It's that 20% where face to face matters, not the other 80%.
I firmly think there is a sea change going on from standard “college” degrees to more practical training that will be a mix of apprenticeship and solid training like air/vac, electricians and online skills, since the vast majority of jobs don’t really need a college degree.
This has actually begun already at the high school level.
Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level.
Some will insist that a portion of the population will be disenfranchised and that is true.
But our education assumptions and priorities have been wrong for so long now that it has actually become the weakness of an entire generation for the last 10-20 years.
Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes.
We’re looking and complaining if colleges will go online or reopen in person classes - but there is so much more going underneath that conversation.
This is maybe (hopefully) the last generation of the “underwater basket weaving” so-called useless degrees.
The student debt problem is not really related to the college format. The format existed in earlier decades, exists in other countries and exists in K-12 education without runaway costs and student debt.
It's mostly a matter of policy. The US' method to expand third level education to most of the population was by government backed and/or subsidized loans, without price controls. This caused an inflation in credit, prices, and cost. This is reversible, but deflation is always painful.
Meanwhile, I disagree that “underwater basket weaving” degrees are the problem. At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance.
These business degrees are fake subjects. The material was invented for the purpose of creating a textbook, course or somesuch. Nothing they teach is useful. Worryingly, these have the greatest intake... because they're easy, and sound relevant to getting a job.
I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.
But, I also think we should try to keep the level of investment (time, money, social capital) in education high. Get efficient by doing more, not doing the same for less.
> At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in.
I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is related to how well that choice of study does for them in the real world.
International relations, anthropology, women's studies, psychology, etc., are all real subjects that students are actually interested in. Some small fraction of the people who study them actually go on to do something near-related to those topics. Many (most?) others go on to work recruiters, office managers, in call centers (etc), immediately throwing away their studies and never revisiting them.
"online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves.
The trend hopefully is not just in how study happens but what people choose to study, because a lot of time and money is being wasted in things that never get used, because a lot of students have no real interests, and we teach them if they choose and go to college for anything - anything at all - then they'll magically do well. This is a lie and a disservice. We should be pushing people towards STEM and trade schools. Hopefully this situation helps do that.
International relations is an actual subject area. It's true that we don't need that many diplomats, and that people might be just studying it out of interest... or because it sounded better than something else.
Most business courses are literally fake. The stuff being taught was invented in order to be taught. Quite a lot of it is learning the meaning of terms that were invented in order to be taught. It's not that there aren't real business subjects. Finance and accounting are real subjects. Economics is a real subject, in the sense that philosophy is a real subject. Statistics, etc.
The trend is (and has been for decades) to teach mostly (or only) fluff courses.
The bottom third of these things are functional equivalents of diploma mills. Ask business graduates over a pint. Most will admit it.
> International relations is an actual subject area. It's true that we don't need that many diplomats
In my experience "International Relations" classes teach very little that's actually valuable. I think there's a common in mistake in thinking at because X is important, then university classes about X are useful. There are a lot of subjects that are important but where the study of it in academia (at least at the undergraduate level, but I suspect higher up as well) isn't handled well at all.
I think the mistake that a lot of people make, however, is thinking that this is merely a humanities vs. STEM issue. There also seems to be a lot (though perhaps not quite as much) useless classes in the STEM fields as well.
Worst of all, I've seen very little interest in academia (both STEM and the humanities) in whether or not their way of teaching is effective - its simply assumed to be, and that's the end of the discussion much of the time. It's claimed that academia fosters critical thinking, but there often seems to be a dearth of critical thinking from those who are within it.
When I dropped out of International Relations to go be an autodidact hacker in the dotcom boom, I noted that the degree program was basically a track to work at the State Department. The professors were highly enthusiastic about it as a profession. Granted this may have just been my school.
I didn’t find any of it relevant at the time. Fast forward 25 years and now that my IT work is distributed full-remote global operations, it turns out my IR foundation gives me a unique [perspective] and VERY influential position in an Engineering org.
So there is a certain long-term value in cross-training in this way.
In my experience, professors will generally exaggerate the usefulness of the classes they teach. I'm curious as to what things from IR you found useful and what actions it lead you to? I've seen many IR grads who went into it hoping to do some sort of international work or business, only to find that businesses didn't find what they were taught particularly valuable (and the people I met who were sent overseas for business usually didn't have an IR background). Many who that I saw who went into the State Department ended up doing low-level grunt work that was completely detached from the kind of things IR focuses on (and the ambassadors are often wealthy donors with no IR experience who receive the position as a political favor).
Also, many of the things that were covered in IR classes weren't just useless, but more often than not turned out to be entirely detached from reality. For instance, focusing on things like Thomas Huntington vs. Thomas Friedman (neither of who seem to have had a great track record or understanding of the world).
I cannot say it was any specific fact or technique I learned. I would say it gave me access to an additional mindset which my colleagues did not possess.
It ended up being a powerful ‘soft’ asset in a transition to engineering management, by virtue of being the staffmember able to identify and resolve problems which originated in cultural and linguistic domains.
One does not need IR training to (say) socially engineer a budget prioritization for sending engineers on overseas exchanges, but I feel it influenced my thinking in this regard.
So, anecdotally, my degree was in philosophy and math, but I now work as a programmer. Yes, semi-related, but coincidentally, really. And I think this is probably the case for you as well (at least, I would guess).
This forms what I think is the underlying thread here. For those that aren't as flexible and creative in applying their talents and education, most of these classes really do end up being useless, and for them, a waste of money in the long run.
If you're already capable, chances are that no matter your field of study, you're going to land somewhere that you can find a way to use your knowledge; but this really seems to me more a case of interest and driven/natural critical thinking skills than it is a reflection of the content of the classes. Those that apply themselves can find niches to sharpen their skills, whereas those opportunities aren't necessarily sought out by everyone.
So, in effect, while some individuals taking classes of any sort, even poorly taught, might have the fervor to find a path towards enrichment, not all students will have this experience. And this leads to the "basket weaving" degrees for others: subjects that, while not generally irrelevant a priori, are generally irrelevant for many experientially.
I agree that a certain aptitude or predisposition could be responsible for it.
There is another aspect which I will add: the ‘softest’ parts of the liberal arts curriculum — International Relations would fit here — was until recently reserved for aristocrats. The children of farmers and factory workers would ostensibly have no use in learning The Great Game. The best players of the game are those who need no employment.
Those of us from anything but the uppermost classes back then would be stumbling into the edges of a world they can dimly perceive, to serve as clerks at best.
Having done some IR work in college while pursuing a mainly CS degree:
Even with decades of professional experience as a diplomat or analyst, your sample size of countries and international situations will be very small. Having both a theoretical understanding of the underlying dynamics, and a broad view of the whole problem space as it has been explored historically, is qualitatively different from the lessons you get on the job.
Nothing in my business experiences matched the experience of the British explorer-aristocrat who guest lectured one day.
He was supposedly in his 80s but appeared 60. His ancestors were some kind of lords of the forests; his father was responsible for training Gurkhas, though he himself preferred the company of the muhajadeen as a boy (photos provided).
He displayed gold disks which could buy humans at certain markets, and spoke of tribes which taught him how to travel in Dreamtime. It was literally thrilling stuff, all too fantastic to believe if not for the artifacts....
I agree in the distinction you're making, I just think that many of the degree programs for these older subjects are effectively acting as "diploma mills" today because their result for the student is about the same.
That's true, but GP is making a distinction between diploma mills that have some underlying substance, vs. ones that are completely fake and invented for purpose.
From the POV of a student entering a job market, anthropology or international studies may be completely useless. But the student gained real knowledge that is useful for some jobs (even if they're not pursuing them). And it can be useful in their life. To use a CS analogy, I never needed calculus or control theory during my $dayjobs, but I use them for myself, to better understand the world and occasionally on hardware hobby projects.
Meanwhile, those fake degrees are literally scams. I.e. students (and their families) are being scammed for their money. The topics are self-referential (invented to be taught), and exist in order to justify spending few years on them, so that the degree rewards putting in work - which makes that degree valuable for employers in the first place. And during the course of that degree, various entities - universities, textbook publishers, etc. - are bleeding students dry. It's not just a degree mill, it's a money printer. The degree becomes purely proof of work, and on top of wasted years of your life, you also have to pay for it.
> Meanwhile, those fake degrees are literally scams. I.e. students (and their families) are being scammed for their money. The topics are self-referential (invented to be taught), and exist in order to justify spending few years on them, so that the degree rewards putting in work - which makes that degree valuable for employers in the first place. And during the course of that degree, various entities - universities, textbook publishers, etc. - are bleeding students dry. It's not just a degree mill, it's a money printer. The degree becomes purely proof of work, and on top of wasted years of your life, you also have to pay for it.
Please provide examples. I thought Communications was bullshit until I read a textbook. Cyber security is not a bullshit field even though actual practitioners hold degree programmes in it in extremely low esteem. What are some examples of business or other degrees that are in some objective sense valueless? Criminal justice degrees or fire science ones are hazing credentialism but they’re not literally worthless and the research they’re based on is real.
I'm not sure about that. Have you read the writing of a recent college grad? I worked with two on a project some time ago, one with a BA in English and another who dropped out of a Mathematics degree.
The one who'd dropped out was clearer and more consistent in their writing than the BA in English. Perhaps math enforces a level of pragmatism that the humanities don't?
Anecdotal, of course, but I've seen this pattern often.
> "online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves.
I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before.
The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time.
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/
Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.
From your source, a NPV of ~$680k in accumulated earnings over 30 years is the average return. That is ~$22,600 earnings per year. I don't think that is a good return by any means.
Am I reading the chart correctly? If so, I don't see how your link favors your argument.
I agree. And the market is telling us that more jobs in these fields are not needed, while STEM has endless technological problems to address and high salaries for the taking.
I think it's a tricky question, because the provided link seems to distinguish liberal arts schools from other non-technology, non-business schools, and I don't know how that distinction is being made. It could be that their subjects are largely similar, but the schools being explicitly marked as "liberal arts" schools are of an elitist class separated by grades and/or family privilege. And that these aspects of the student rather than the content of the degree are what account for the return. Certainly some liberal arts degrees are warranted by the market, but if what's happening is that all the ones from a second rank of colleges are simply not being considered as liberal arts, then that kind of misrepresents what's going on.
There isn't a crisis of unemployed liberal arts majors in America or the world, there is a reason for that. Of course there are a lot of people that have convinced themselves that there is such a crisis!
I think it's useful for society to have a significant chunk of the population that knows a lot about social sciences or humanities, even if it doesn't translate directly to job skills. On a simple level, as a trans person, I would be really glad to know that my office manager majored in gender studies. On a more grand level, I think it would be good for US foreign policy if every voter had at least one friend who had studied international relations. Therefore, I don't see it as a social problem that we have a lot of people spending a few years of their lives studying those things, although I do think it's a problem that we charge them absurd amount to do it. By contrast, I don't think that whatever they teach in "online marketing" has any positive effect on society. It might even be negative. Those degrees I do see as a social problem.
I also agree that it's a problem that a lot of people are going into college just because they don't have any other ideas and it's seen as a respectable thing to do. I think the main cause is that our society doesn't give nearly enough support to people entering the workforce, and is oddly determined for people to move from being a full-time student to a full-time worker, with nothing in between.
Online marketing teaches how to communicate value of something. Of course, some companies abuse the approach and lie, but the more people who can communicate ideas well, the better.
I am currently a physics student (in Germany) and have to tell you that people "throwing away their studies" is not something STEM-students are exempt from. In fact most physics students (at least in Germany) will go on and do something totally unrelated very soon after graduating. We graduate a lot more people than what are actually used in science and physics related industries. Of course some fraction of the aquired skills may also be useful in other jobs, but that applies to a lot of studies in the humanities as well.
> We should be pushing people towards STEM and trade schools. Hopefully this situation helps do that.
Might as well cut the S and M off that because most people who get a science degree probably aren't working in the filednwithout higher education and even the there's so few jobs available. Most people with math education probably aren't working directly in mathematics, but at least you can make the argument that there are other fields where math is related enough to be somewhat useful.
> I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is related to how well that choice of study does for them in the real world
I think while the correlation may be weaker than what some claim, it is still there. To put it another way, I have seen very few cases of students who hated the field, were force-fed it and then would turn it a successful career. And a few that would do that tend to look for opportunities to change course. Being really interested in a subject is a great encouragement to acquire deep knowledge, not just a good grade. And such deep knowledge can bring benefits for the rest of the life.
As an example: I have a PhD in math but "tossed it" and went to work writing software and algorithms. My employers never cared about my PhD. I never used much of the "PhD" math I learned in grad school and I probably forgot most of it. Computing a homology group? Topological entropy? Forget it.
But was the PhD a waste? I do not think so! As a side effect of being in grad school, teaching undergrad classes and arguing with friends doing math and physics I became friends with many fields and learned techniques that still serve me well. So definitely no regrets for me for spending 5 years learning things I did not directly use afterwards.
I do agree with your last point -- we should not be telling students that anything they study will lead them to success after graduation. They should choose a field with some applications. But among the multitude of such fields they should choose one they genuinely like. My 2c.
> Some small fraction of the people who study them actually go on to do something near-related to those topics. Many (most?) others go on to work recruters, office managers, in call centers (etc), immediately throwing away their studies and never revisiting them.
You are drawing a line that is convenient to your argument.
I have an engineering degree, and worked for a bunch of years in my discipline. As part of the degree, I had to take 3 calculus courses and one differential equations course. Never needed them on the job. I took 2 circuits courses, 3 electronics courses, 2 communications courses, 2 E&M courses, 1 control theory course, and 1 microcontrollers course - all part of my major. About half were mandatory (not electives). Of these, only 2 courses were relevant for my job. I could have done it as effectively as I did without taking all those other courses.
Amongst engineers, my engineering experience is not an outlier. My experience is the norm. Even while I was in college that was the feedback I would get from people in industry: Most of the engineering courses are useless for your job, and getting the degree is merely a formality and not much of an indicator of knowledge/expertise. The whole "a degree shows you can commit to something for a dedicated amount of time" is mostly a post hoc justification.
Your argument that a "small fraction" of people who study them actually go on to use them applies very well to engineering degrees. I suspect they would apply equally well to CS degrees as well. I mean, I'm the perfect example. I took very little CS in school, but make a living as a SW professional.
Most people I know who got math degrees (but not a PhD) use almost none of it in their jobs - even the technical jobs. Ditto for physics. Should we do away with these as well?
In general, look at all the people who have a BS degree in something other than CS and are working in the SW industry. Look at their degrees. While engineers like me often actually do go on to become engineers, for probably all other majors (math, physics, literature, philosophy, etc) you'll find they rarely get a job in their discipline.
I've lived in countries where those subjects are usually not offered in universities. It really sucks. You usually end up with 2 scenarios:
A class full of people who don't care about the subject but are taking it because society has deemed that what they are interested in is not to be taught in universities. This often results in a lowering of the standards to appease them (who are often in the majority). Indeed, many math majors in the US complain about this - calculus, diff eq and linear algebra are usually taught to cater to engineers, and not math majors.
Or you'll get the other extreme, where the standards are made unnecessarily tight to keep those people out, but in effect also then prevent decent students who are interested in the topic from studying it.
STEM includes hard science and mathematics - is there that much more demand for math or biology majors than for any of the social sciences? A math undergrad seems just as likely to end up in a call centre or as an office manager
Almost all math graduates at my undergrad ended up going into (a) finance as quants, (b) PhD program, (c) data or SWE-related job in tech [me], or (d) some kind of K-12 math educator job.
Probably 30% PhD, 30% SWE/data in tech, 20% quant, 20% K-12 education. The people who did K-12 wanted to do that for much of their life typically, and the people who did PhD either (50%) knew that's exactly what they wanted to or, or really didn't know what they wanted to do.
Perhaps our program doesn't reflect the story on a national level though. Unsure there.
I think calling "most business degrees excepting accounting and finance" a problem just seems wrong and frankly pretty arrogant. I do think too many people take business degrees and think they'll just "become managers" (and there's a high number of "don't know what else to do" type of students) but there are many actually useful things taught in the typical degree programs.
I mean thinking of a typical non specialized business BA here (Germany) the math and statistics classes are pretty useful, as is the basic economics primer. The required law courses and tax related courses are pretty useful. Accounting, finance and controlling are useful as well and so are marketing (mostly math/data analysis), strategy, project management and production management (usually operations research centric but also covers quality management). HR seems fairly meh unless you want to go into HR (as the most relevant stuff is already covered in law).
The typical electives cover more in depth of the above and sometimes business information systems, psychology, programming and the like.
And there's some other stuff that's pretty useful like negotiation classes or case studies (if they cover interesting topics).
Well... criticising anyone's degree (even though I also have such a degree) is always arrogant. That's the point we're at though. It has become the most popular degree while simultaneously getting worse in quality... starting from a low base.
As I said, I have one of these degrees, and have hired and worked with many people with such degrees.
First, I agree that the math and (particularly) the statistics classes are useful. Finance and accounting too, in theory, though the vast majority do not seem to internalize much. Business pretty minimal though. A 3-4 years business degree comes with less math education than the first year of an engineering degree, chemistry, physics, etc.
Also.. the majority of business degrees today allow students to avoid most math altogether... and most students do this. The whole thing is continuously moving downmarket. Most business degrees (graduate & undergraduate) are not recognised BAs anymore.
"The market" wants easy degrees with no math. They also don't want accounting or finance. This leaves just the nonsense.
IMO, at this point, most business degrees are less useful than history, philosophy, etc. Graduate salaries are about the same.
> Most business degrees (graduate & undergraduate) are not recognised BAs anymore.
Why does it matter if they’re BA or something else? And recognised by who?
And obviously a postgrad business degree is not going to be a BA... because that’s an undergrad degree.
I think if you’re saying a MBA from a reputable school is useless I think you’re being really really silly. I see the opportunities these degrees give you and they are in a most literal sense extremely useful. They also seem academically valuable to me, with fascinating lectures by extremely well qualified people, and visiting amazing institutions.
The practice of going through case studies and learning essentially a history of failures and successes in business was extremely valuable. The frameworks can be a little academic at times, but showing people how to think about business problems from multiple perspectives is very educational and useful when you actually have to solve your own business problem.
I was a business major for a year and a half before switching to biology. It is worth it to go over case studies and learn accounting, IMO lots of the value gained is through instructer-led group discussion which doesn’t really work over zoom. This led me to actually making a startup and learning much more about how businesses is done than I would have.
well, that might be the case with the US, but here in Germany state-schools are not really down that path yet, with most including a stats intro (quality varies), a math intro and accounting for everyone.
The only place, where I've seen this super-useless business-degrees actually was a private uni, selling a "marketing" bachelors. Not sure, what the person (acquaintance of my sister) learned there, but apparently it didn't even know a lot about the internet as a marketplace, last time I talked...
Practicing math avoidance is indeed a path to a low paying career. This includes those who get engineering degrees while taking the minimum and easiest math courses possible. Then their jobs get outsourced.
I disagree about the college format going completely online. There is so much about the college experience that is not directly related to earning a degree. It's a place where most people are exposed to new ideas, new types of people. It's a place where lasting friendships and relationships are formed. It's a place of growth that an online experience could never hope to replicate, and that's the REAL benefit of college.
I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.
I guess that's fine for them, but I would want more for myself, and for my children.
> I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.
I did exactly that. Lived at home, attended college, and also worked nearly full time to pay for school. I graduated with nearly no debt, and the the day after graduating college moved out with a good job.
Not sure how that makes someone a coward or afraid to go outside their small circle. Some of the people I went to HS with all went to the same big state school so they could actually stay in the their small circle. Once done, they moved back to where we grew up, are still in the same small circle, and have/had large college debt to go along with it.
I haven't seen anyone from HS in over 15 years, and have lived and traveled all over. I would be cautious to paint people making financially prudent decisions with such a broad brush.
well, if you look closer, the people telling this bs are actually all coming from a more than well-off-background.
Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss.
I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (lived in a small city next to uni-town, where there's basically nothing happening and except for my small circle, I didn't find HS people very interesting...), but basically all the great experiences cost money and/or time of which there is none, if you really do it in a financially sound way while studying something MINTy... (and I doubt that feeling like a slave is the glorious experience).
Note: probably I was a coward in the beginning for not moving away, because then I could have gotten state-assistance and cheap student dorms... Though that's kind of a though choice, when your uni of choice is basically the academically best around in your country... (and frankly, at this point I didn't have a lot of people telling me, that this not necessarily is, what you want in a bachelors degree...)
I think many of the people who weren’t well off only afforded this experience by taking on debt.
Besides, there’s more ways than just college to have that “real” growth experience. Military, mission work, peace corps. Hell, I’d even argue these are more of an experience because they aren’t built on the somewhat artificial backdrop of universities that can insulate you from the “real” world without all the debt downside
I have no military experience. But I've talked to people who have claimed that the experience erases racially biased tendencies in a lot of people through exposure and a familial bond with people from different backgrounds. It's anecdotal, but I sincerely hope that is the case
I believe it can and does. And I also know there are military white supremacists groups too and that these groups like to recruit in military. But racism was not my point.
Military has actual big price in people who join it. Veterans do have issues to adjust back to civilian society. Which is basically euphemism for whole host of serious issues. Military families divorce often and their famillies do have actual issues due to frequent moving or partner long term away. Domestic violence rates are high.
The whole growth experience is leaving quite a few people in difficult situations after.
And it rubs me wrong when it is framed as "less insulated the 'real' world. It is as insulated as it gets. Or as "real life" or "real growth" as opposed to "not real life" in quite common experience of either college or job or having familly that functions in more normal way.
>The whole growth experience is leaving quite a few people in difficult situations after.
This is true. It’s not a cakewalk for everybody. But the dichotomy of some of those difficult situations is they can both foster growth and simultaneously stress is an individual. I think some would say that stress/sacrifice is a necessary precursor for that growth. Unfortunately, sometimes the stress exceeds the individuals coping mechanisms.
The book Tribe gives an interesting perspective on military service. The author wrote it after his personal growth (and stress) from creating the documentary Restrepo about the outpost of the same name in Afghanistan.
I can understand that, my dad was in the military and I experienced some of those realities first hand, but it was before I was born and he has never really talked to me about his experience outside of teeny tiny "fun" bites. But, I'm really curious about white supremacist groups in the military. Is it a separate hierarchy? Is it wide spread? Do they recruit from within the military or get people to join with the intention of joining their klan? I had no idea that was a thing, but I again, am clueless.
... and depending on what you're forced to do "for your country", it might mess you up psychologically. And at least in the US, we sadly don't take very good care of our veterans.
I wasn’t implying some sort of mandatory military service, just that there are other avenues to personal growth. I personally don’t think advocating a rite of passage potentially built upon lifelong debt is prudent
It can but it can also expose you to a lot of different cultures and experiences outside your comfort zones. Like anything else, it’s somewhat incumbent on the individual to engage those experiences.
You may he stationed away, but exposire to many cultures is likely a bit of stretch. It is exposure in very specific way. (If you are in navy, you have some free time to shop and drink once in few months.) Soldiers does not exactly have reputation for understanding tolerance for different cultures.
And it is not in your individual controll to engage with experiences or not. Being soldier is opposite of making individual choices. You do a lot in groups, group conformity and group cohesion are bug things, you get told what to do.
I think this is just one area where we disagree. Sometimes I think people assume all deployments are to combat zones which is not the case. Even in combat deployments, a larger portion of time is spent on humanitarian missions than people realize.
I don’t know your age or experience, but what you said doesn’t ring true to me. If you’re deployed to a non-combat zone you don’t just get a day off every couple weeks. You have liberty most nights and weekends, at least if you’re not actually stationed on a ship.
It’s no different than college. You can be the person who just holes up and plays video games, or just go out in the same groups without exposing yourself to different ideas, or you can get out of your comfort zone. I’ve known people who made the most of their free time by regularly volunteering in local clinics/emergency rooms, lived outside of base in the city with locals, exposed themselves to local culture etc. There’s more freedom than many think. And this is coming from lower enlisted ranks of one of the branches with a reputation of being more disciplined and strict.
Going to less good university just so that you leave home sounds to me like immature decision. It is the sort of thing teenagers do - doing something irrational just to prove that I am an adult.
I think that if you have good relationships with parents, do your part in the house chores, the school nearby is actually good, there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at home. If you cant wait till you leave the family home, then maybe it is not that you are super mature, maybe simply relationships in your family sux. Which is not a badge of honor.
To add, living outside of campus have one big advantage - freaking uninterrupted sleep time.
> In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards.
How dare you place judgement on other people's circumstances. Moving away from your family to immerse yourself in your studies is certainly one way to grow as a person, but far from the only way.
Maybe someone has to take care of a family member and can't realistically do that, even if they wanted to. However, taking classes while also taking care of a family member, is that a coward or someone strong?
Maybe someone already knows the path they want to take in life and they see the cost of room and board as an unnecessary expense they can instead save to buy a condo elsewhere. Is that person a coward for being focused or strong?
Maybe someone needs a familiar support network such as a strong family to thrive academically. Is that person a coward for being self aware or strong?
How many people did you meet your freshman year who you thought in the back of your mind, wow they really should have taken a gap year. All they did was waste money on tuition and room and board while they partied and failed courses. Are all these people strong for making lifelong friendships against their better judgement or cowards?
So many reasons why people chose the path they do, I could keep going on here. I would have thought someone getting a liberal arts education would be open minded to other experiences. It sounds like you judge people who not follow in your footsteps, and for that, how dare you!
> I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.
this might be true of the people you know, but I hope you don't think it holds in general. at the state school I went to, room and board cost the same amount as the in-state tuition itself. for a lot of families, this is not "minimal". if your parents have a spare room and already cook dinner every night, this almost doubles the cost of your education.
if your parents treat you like an adult (ie, you control your schedule, no curfew, etc.), there's no reason why you can't get the full college experience as a commuter.
At most state schools (including the one that employs me) on-campus room and board now costs at least as much as tuition due to years of upward pressure on amenities from [parents of] students and the resulting ill-considered public/private development deals.
I agree that the spending time immersed in the university environment is one of the most important parts of the college experience, but you don't have to get expensively kenneled on campus to do that, just spend time on campus with interesting people and interesting organizations.
I would only suggest most people deal with on-campus housing if it is being primarily paid for by a scholarship or grant they won't have to pay back and/or their circumstances don't offer a good alternative. If you're attending a school where there is an option for family (or whatever) that can provide you with a non-distracting environment and a _short_ commute for cheap, do that for a year. Once you establish a cohort of known-reliable friends with similar needs, rent with them, or pick up a modest apartment. I will say, IMO, renting with unknown quantity randos from a campus-predator slumlord _is_ a worse option to university housing, it includes both sets of disadvantages.
I'm also of the opinion that you have a substantial number of gen-eds you still have to take (not covered by APs, etc.), and they won't be paid for by a scholarship, do a year or so at a community college. It will be cheaper and better than the university service courses - gigantic sections taught from materials outsourced to ed-tech carpetbaggers, supervised by disinterested graduate students with alarming English skills, optimized to extract tuition from kids who statistically won't make it. I say this after years of discovering my students who took their early calculus sequence at community college, embarrassingly, tend to be more mathematically literate than the ones who did it at the university. I'm not yet convinced if that is because the ones that had the maturity to do it that way are predisposed and/or usually a little older, or the quality of the early sequence at [intentionally unnamed university] are really that poor.
Room and board costing more than tuition is not a new thing and I doubt amenities is the whole reason. I went to a state school over twenty years ago and room and board cost more than tuition. It was hardly amenity-rich: most rooms were doubles with a shared bathroom down the hall, no carpet, old worn furniture, and no air conditioning. The food was cafeteria style where fajita night was a big feature. The rec center was considered glorious but was funded by a separate fee of about a hundred bucks a semester.
I suspect room and board costs what it does compared to tuition simply because putting undergrads in a big lecture just doesn’t cost all that much. In addition, the tuition for resident students gets subsidized, while the room and board generally doesn’t.
Also, room and board are normally considered auxiliary enterprises, and self-funding. If they have profits, they contribute those to the university, but they are not budgeted with the general campus funds.
There are less expensive ways to get the social experience of college.
My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.
We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.
Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.
I'm pretty sure most/all the people who think that college gives you a unique social experience that you can't get elsewhere are just suffering from confirmation bias, and also perhaps want to justify why they spent so much money.
I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.
If you work in Silicon Valley you will make friends that will pull you from company to company. All of the companies I worked for in my career (except 1) I got a call from a friend.
The one exception was they knew about me even though I didn't know about them. Halfway through one of my interviews I realized that I knew the interviewer by reputation.
> I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards.
Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.
> Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.
Exactly. This comment is quite insensitive even if ignoring the tuition costs in America. There are other reasons for living at home with your parents while going to university. I personally had to do this due to severe chronic health problems. I was 100% capable of going to university full time while working part time. I just needed to be able to live at home.
> I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.
In reality, required room and board (usually for freshmen) is merely a way for colleges to make money. The whole "experience" angle is a pretext, but not the real reason. I'm glad my undergrad did not require it.[1] I don't doubt some people benefit from it, but I'm sure most don't. Anecdotally, those who stayed in dorms were more likely to party a lot more and be less focused on studies - lots of distractions. I personally knew quite a few who eventually moved off campus for the sole purpose of eliminating those distractions because their grades were dropping.
[1] I did not stay with family, I paid rent in an apartment. Definitely cheaper. The amusing thing is we folks who had our own apartment generally perceived those who stayed on campus as being less mature. They had meal plans, etc, whereas we were responsible for cooking, etc. I forget what else those who lived on campus had spoon fed to them, but it went beyond just meals.
Heh. That’s the US college experience. College in France is not that fun. You mostly go to class and then go home. I met most of my friends outside of campus during student organized events, so the only benefit was that I was living in a student town where people moved to to go to its university, but the university itself was eventless.
I think this is the thing most people in the US miss when they want higher education to be free for all. Our university system- both public and private- is wildly overpriced compared to other countries with more public funding.
Small state schools are closer to that, but any of the bigger schools seem to think that because students get easy access to excessive amounts of cheap loans, they can be extravagant in budgeting- sports facilities, gyms, administration, etc.
It's the pretty standard response when you're a service provider and you know your customer isn't directly footing the bill: you either just flat out raise prices, or you add on expensive amenities to make you look more competitive/attractive.
I guess you could say the same for a publicly-funded system, but at least there the funding is limited and controlled. A lot of people sadly won't blink twice at taking out a larger college loan, even if it'll saddle them with crippling debt later on.
I wanted to study abroad when I was in undegrad and couldn't afford it, I opted to take courses at a French university instead. I highly recommend going that route for anyone college aged. I spent less money then I would have at my University in the US for the same time and it was a level of exposure (and frankly, discomfort, that I really grew from) that I don't think my more well off friends got from similar study abroad programs with mostly english speaking peers.
I’m sorry but 99% of “the college experience” you get from being with your peers and having experiences with them that are extra curricular, that is to say out of the scope of explicit education. It is available to all non-students as well, but since so many people come of age at university they assume it’s the same thing.
>I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards.
1. Anecdotal evidence that you know a few people that didn't grow up for whatever reason does not mean everyone is like that.
2. In most asian culture, people live with their parents for the entirety of life. Somehow according to you more than half the world's population is cowards. I digress because we're talking about american colleges and living in America but it still baffles me that someone educated like you would think there is nothing wrong with a stupid argument using selection bias.
In most asian culture, people live with their parents for the entirety of life
As a non Asian (with an admittedly fictional Asian pseudonym) I happen to be a member of a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits. It’s an extremely popular group, largely made up of young high school to late-20s Asian-Americans (and expats living in other western countries). The most common and persistent theme is the tension between westernized Asian kids and their traditional parents. These kids are desperate to get away from this controlling influence. They find temporary relief and camaraderie by joking about how extremely strict their parents are.
> It's a place where most people are exposed to new ideas, new types of people.
I dunno honestly. Maybe it is different elsewhere, but the college was the most uniform place I have been at. I am not complaining, I liked the experience and did fit in. But it was not diversity in literally any sense of the word.
It depends on the college. In my experience one had a vibrant cultural meetin grounds of myraid intersts and approaches where you see things like a small but visible minority of unicyclists (this is not an absurd example for the generic, a real thing).
While the other was a generic and bland sadness that suck the life out of the room and "binge drinking" is the closest form to a local culture and even things which should be a source of culture like the arts are just another box to be checked on somebody's list for posturing's sake.
Was it religious school which went secular in practice or offically? I know some who suspect that the number one reason for that blandness is former religious school that lost the fundamentalist character which drove out the heterodox and was then left with a despeciated monocultural void.
I think for better or for worse what actually drives the selection of people determines the resulting culture and diversity.
No, not religious at all. And I would not call it bland either, as I told I liked it.
But pretty much everyone around you was, well, college student of roughly same age. And plus everyone was focused on math, computer science or something similar. The university itself had other fields of study, obviously, but they had own building so practically you rarely really interacted with each other.
The city it was in obviously had sports clubs, entertainment and whatnot where you could meet non-college students or people of different age or people who study something different. You was not forced to close yourself into some kind university bubble.
But university itself necessary collects similar people at one place. Because everyone there has to be college student and has similar choice of study.
> In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards
I don't know when the last time you've lived in dorms was, but they're glorified summer camps for adolescents. Having meal plans and an RA aren't exactly badges of courage.
If you don't come from means or have parents that will help pay for you to move out, then taking on living expenses to study is not exactly a good financial choice.
In the UK, we had a maintenance book where you could report things that were broken (even things as trivial as a light bulb - you were told _not_ to replace them on your own), porters who you could give you a spare key if you lost yours and were responsible for external security, catered meals three times a day that were cheap enough that cooking for yourself was fairly pointless from a financial standpoint unless it was something very basic, subsidised rents (which also covered utilities), and an onsite bar. It wasn't exactly a step into the real world - you had a _lot_ done for you.
Personally, I wouldn't change it for the world. Student loans covered the expenses (which as you only pay as a small percentage of your wage above a certain amount and are written off after 30 years if you haven't paid them aren't worth worry about too much), and it had both academic and social benefits. Supervisions often started after 18:00 and occasionally ran on til 23:00, and you could have lectures at 9:00 the next morning, which would be a pain with a commute, and you had easier access to resources (libraries, computing facilities).
I threw myself into the social side, having been fairly reclusive during secondary school - I felt much more comfortable doing so living on site, and I got involved in extra curricular activities I wouldn't have done if I had a commute. I had close friends studying law, natural sciences, economics, engineering, medicine, English, anthropology, and music (I studied computer science), and developed a better understanding of and appreciation for these subjects as a result (I remember discussing Roman law somehow becoming a bizarrely frequent subject in first year). I'm still in almost daily contact with the friendship group I formed there, even ten years on. I did a Master's afterwards, and lived at home, and I never felt as connected to either my studies or my peer group.
Still, I certainly wouldn't call anyone who doesn't do that a coward, and think you could get a similar or better experience living off campus at home. It just turned out to be the right step for me[1] - it pushed me enough out of my comfort zone to grow without leaving me feeling lost - and gave me a much better university experience as a result.
[1] And it was effectively required by my university - you have to live within three miles of the city centre, required permission to live outside of college, and you weren't allowed to keep a car within ten miles of the city centre without permission (https://www.proctors.cam.ac.uk/motor-control)
Would you be comfortable having to pay for that experience decades later or past retirement? A lot of people in the US are in that boat, and the debts are non-dischargable.
The sheer number of people triggered by this comment shows just how immersed in class politics tech geeks are. It's a sad thing. Is it really so controversial that 18 year olds sometimes (not all the time) make poor financial decisions?
Your experience is true for some and false for others. That's the nature of anecdotes. I moved off campus to save a couple bucks and be "independent" and "spartan" but I missed out on a lot of stuff. I could have been closer to extracurriculars, I could have joined a frat. I get that not everyone has the resources for this stuff, but many do, and we're missing out on something if they can't experience it.
My mother would not let me live at home while I went to college specifically for this reason. She commuted to school and worked a part-time off-campus job. She regrets that she missed out on a true college experience and did not want the same for me.
This is part of the reason why I think the level of investment needs to remain high. College performs a complex task. It can't just be replaced by coursera.
I do think that in-person lectures, course design and such need a total overhaul. Modern technology does change the equation. In-person lectures no longer make sense, for example. That doesn't mean in-person college doesn't make sense.
Is college actually good at that sort of thing, or is it just better than staying at home? If I spent half my college tuition on networking, social clubs, conferences, hobby groups, etc, I bet I could do a lot better than I did at my college campus.
In theory, you could take your college costs and spend them more wisely elsewhere. Internet age gurus like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin & others have been advocating this for 20 years.
Want to learn business? Take $50k out of the $200k price tag of a fancy college and start a business with a few similarly minded people. Pay a seasoned business person to advise you. After 4 years, you will know much more about business. Same for software engineering, etc. Same for side-effects like networking horizon expansion and everything.
In practice, all that money (whether parental savings to student loans) is tied up with college. The social capital which allows anyone to spend 4 years on abstract "betterment" is tied to college. The safety nets keeping you on course to graduate aren't there.
It's theoretically possible, easy even. In practice, this level of determined heterodoxy is a 1-in-a-thousand thing. Very unlikely to be chosen and very unlikely to bee seen through by a 20-year old.
People operate within structure. We are orders of magnitude less independent than we imagine.
I don’t think 20 year olds avoid this path because they lack your insight, it’s probably more that most people can’t get $200k from their parents to start a business.
I think they mostly do lack that insight, but it's not their fault. They've been taught from a very young age what the "right" path to adulthood is. It's hard to overcome that programming, especially since (US) K-12 schools aren't exactly about teaching creative, independent thought. People who come away from K-12 schools with that kind of thing usually arrived at it outside school.
(Also I think the parent meant that the 20-year-old would take $50k from their parents, not $200k. But agree that $50k is likely out of reach for most people in that situation as well.)
Yup, agreed. I figure most parents don't even have the $50k lying around to give their new HS graduate (they'd get it for college through loans and grants). Good luck getting a small business loan as an 18-year-old with no business experience. Savings vehicles for education like a 529 plan certainly won't let you take that money out to start a business.
Life works this way because life works this way. Social structures exist to reinforce the status quo, and these are only changed incrementally, over a long period of time. Potential college-goers who want to jump the queue and do something radical right now, even if it's a much better thing, are going to have a hard time unless they have well-off parents who are willing to take a shot on them.
College takes a lot of the administrative burden off of that stuff - offering student groups funding, space to meet, administrative support, systems to adjudicate disputes, etc.
If you think about yourself at 18... how likely would you have been to seek out social clubs, conferences, or hobby groups on your own?
Dang! That is something I had not considered before!
I think that would be a great strategy! Spending the money on hobby groups, conferences etc could be put on a resume!
Now thinking of all kinds of options that would give better experience...it seems driving to these might be the bottleneck. But surely there are ones that can subject a student to different opinion/people etc without needing to commute. Heck even a good internship could replace dorm life, and would actually PAY the student.
Since education loans are legally protected from bankruptcy, good luck getting the school of hard knocks financed. It is, I think, a great idea if you are self motivated, but butts up against current reality.
I went to college late dropped out and then went to college again even later in life.
There are many more job opportunities available to me now. But funny you talk about business degrees I found out I lost a job I was qualified for to a person with a business degree. It was just Helpdesk but the business degree person had no IT experience. It was at a large well-known financial organization.
>I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.
When I went back to college many of the students younger than me had nothing but contempt for classroom style learning. Some of those people failed within the first semester or early second semester. There's also a strong belief anything can be learned by Googling it. I learned about Course Hero when my lab partner submitted a paper we worked on, I was almost expelled. Knowing something takes effort even if you are handed the answers. You can't shortcut learning because knowledge isn't given it's earned.
> You can't shortcut learning because knowledge isn't given it's earned.
That's right. It's like using a lever to lift that barbell isn't going to make you stronger. Training your brain requires effort, just like training your muscles.
> Meanwhile, I disagree that “underwater basket weaving” degrees are the problem. At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance.
I somewhat agree. Sadly, I find that of the degrees offered online, they mostly seem to be either the "underwater basket weaving" degrees or the "online marketing" degrees.
Canada's system is pretty messed up, tons of people graduate with $50k-$100k in debt, and interest and forced payments kick in essentially the day you graduate.
> At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance.
I don't think that the data doesn't really support your conclusion.
I would define "success" or "usefulness" on the basis of something measurable, such as average starting salaries for a given major.
Even if business degrees are "fake" subjects, I believe they have higher average outcomes/starting salaries than most humanities majors.
Seeing as outcome and job opportunities are the real thing that the customers (students) care about, it makes the most sense to look at the actual outcomes, using a measurable metric.
Is college for 'betterment' or 'your interest', about getting a job. I'm not against the first two, but as a member of society I'm only interested in the last one, and I don't think I should be asked to subsidize your hobbies. If you can't get a better job because of education then I want nothing to do with it.
Betterment means all of these. What it means to you means what you think is better. Anyway, why should a hobbiest be asked to subsidize your career progression?
Great question. If someone gets a good job they won't be jealous of me. Most violent crime is by poor people, so I have an interest in there being no poor people.
Regardless of how much student interest there is in dark ages French literature, it doesn’t do them any good to prepare them for working or even interacting with modern society.
Do you have any sources for the increase in government assistance? Because that doesn't seem right to me. Tuition has increased at a far higher rate compared to say government expenditure on Pell grants and government subsidized loans. But I could be wrong.
Governments both state and federal could provide incentives for low cost trade schools if they wanted to. What is to stop them from granting favorable loan interest or even forgiving the loans like they do for the peace corp?
It's hard to run a micro-policy in a contradictory macro-environment.
The incentives (mostly via credit, but also social incentive) for regular college is already super-high... as is the incentive of colleges that receive this credit as payment.
You would need to overcome that with even bigger incentives... creating the same inflation problem, but now for trade schools. If you don't, trade schools have to compete with colleges funded by the ever increasing student loan complex.
Imagine a country that has a suburban housing policy similar to the college education policy. Contractors get subsidies, donations, grants. Buyers have access to easy, no money down, no question mortgages backed by a government. Prices inflate. Houses get bigger. A massive debt pool keeps growing.
You say: "this is really inefficient. Don't some of you want downtown apartments instead?" This isn't going to work while competing with the other housing system... no matter how reasonable the plan is. Throw in a stigma about apartment-dwellers... your plan is now doomed.
Unless students are paying out of pocket (student loan schemes don't count), then you need price controls.
Yea no more pesky English majors and philosophy students who bring up all sorts of annoying questions about the power structures that create our society. Can't we just stop thinking about stuff and get back to work!
I'm also hoping that CS will be transformed into something more useful, thinking about complexity theory is a waste of time (outside of helping us make good white boarding questions). We really need an army of CRUD engineers to do useful stuff. If you're learning about something that doesn't make someone else money, you're wasting everyone's time.
Thank god ML has learned to focus from the start on making things that make money. Only handful of whiny researchers complain about annoying things like "oooh we don't really understand how this works, we should understand foundations, blah blah".
But statisticians, oh boy, those academic nerds are the opposite of those ML folks. Always complaining that we aren't running A/B tests correct, and not accounting for confounding variables. All we need to know about stats is how to put results for a marketing experiment into a calculator and then tell the marketing director that the variant they like better is the winner. You can learn that in two weeks.
Brave new world with such people in it!
(bonus points to anyone who recognizes the work of Shakespeare both this post and parent reference).
I strongly agree with you. I know many people whose whole views on religion, politics, society were changed through their humanities courses at university. Personally I gained a deeper knowledge of history, a love of art, and a real interest in ethics just from my mandatory general education courses (I was a CS major).
Now imagine you remove that knowledge from the adults of your country. You remove that knowledge from heads of industry, community leaders, and voters. What kind of society are you left with? College needs to be expanded to all with an emphasis on the liberal arts, a high school education just isn’t good enough to produce a good society.
Trades have been more lucrative than many liberal arts-esque jobs for decades. Awareness isn’t the issue. The issue is social acceptability.
Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans, nothing will change. Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades. It is a problem of culture, not economics.
==Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans==
Source? I think most people view these jobs as the foundation of the American middle class. At least we do in the Midwest, where I grew up.
==Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades.==
Having a Harvard degree gives you higher earning potential than a career in the trades [1].
==It is a problem of culture, not economics.==
Oddly, all the jobs you mention are historically union jobs. Meanwhile, one side of the political aisle has attempted to weaken unions over the past 4 decades. If we want people to embrace union jobs, maybe we should embrace unions?
College vs. trade school isn't just about money or 'social acceptability', it's also about opportunity. A 18 year old who goes to trade school to become an electrician is going to become an electrician, they are not going to be able to change their minds in two years and become a biologist.
That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.
It seems like an easy solution to this is to have a 'trade academy' or a coalition of trade schools that allow / require you to do a rotation in each of the related trade specialties, i.e., if building / construction related, you spend a week / month / quarter learning about plumbing, electrical, framing, mechanical, landscape, etc. This would both promote understanding of related fields and give people an exposure to a variety of potential interests.
This is not unlike the required courses that predominate pre-major studies at a traditional university (in the U.S., at least)
I think it's still going to be hard to get 'middle class' parents to embrace this for their kids - and I am a 'middle class' parent.
If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.
I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.
What you're describing is often done in trade high schools. Freshman will rotate through trades and pick one to continue on.
Once you need a career it doesn't really work like that though, often you're working years as an apprentice in a specified trade before you can even think about branching out on your own.
If you switch trades you're back at the bottom with apprenticeships all over again.
Someone like an English major can much easily change careers as long as they're somewhat adjacent (e.g., copywriting, research, journalism, etc) and generally starts off at a higher salary depending on their degree level. Until you hit masters level most degrees are broad generalized education.
Trades are specializations. If you're unsure about which trade you want to get into, you'd likely be better served with a business degree (which is another generalized area of study)... at least that can be applied across trades. Many tradespeople struggle with the business side of things despite being very practiced at their trade.
Sure, they can change their mind and become a biologist. But in doing so, they throw away the two years. They have to start college from zero, because their trade-school classes don't translate into college credits.
You can start college at 20 as easily as at 18. The problem is that you get nothing for the two years (except, I suppose, you can work as an electrician to pay for college, instead of working at McDonalds).
I'm guessing that our hypothetical student must or might take a college-level Biology course as part of their undergrad degree, and that exposure might cause them to change their mind about their chosen field.
I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.
"Underwater basket weaving degrees" is a great piece of rhetoric because it lets the listener project their personal most hated field in its place. If you think gender studies degrees are useless, I don't see the value in marketing, and we run into this little meme: boom, suddenly we're attacking higher education hand in hand. Epstein conspiracies are another example. Lots of people think he didn't kill himself. Ask them what did happen and they're at loggerheads, but if you can steer thoughts away from that you have broad public support. It's a clever if disastrous way to build American anti-intellectualism.
At the risk of being a Starship Troopers "I'm Doing My Part!" recruitment video, I respect all of the plumbers, seamstresses, tailors, drycleaners, carpenters, &c that I have hired for help.
I know my limits of what I can do. I can sew my own buttons, do a shitty hem on something that doesn't matter. Repairing the plumbing on a bathroom sink I did catastrophic damage too is towards my upper limit; I was able to source replacement material and do the labor myself, but I consider myself fortunate that I was able to do that with only a week without a bathroom sink. Also, don't tell my landlord but now I do have a plumber's wrench on hand.
So I go to the experts. The tailor, the seamstress, the plumber. "This broke, I messed up, you can fix it better, yes next Thursday after 4pm sounds fantastic."
Yes, I understand the pride in doing things yourself. I also see no shame in shooting up a flair.
Trades are tough on the body. A job-related injury can leave you unable to work. It seems like a rational choice to make the same amount of money typing on a computer, especially in a country lacking a significant social net.
Sitting and typing at a computer all day isn't particularly healthy either, for what it's worth. I do recognize that standing desks can mitigate this, but it's even tough on the wrists.
Several of my family members work in the trades. The level of damage done to their bodies is way higher than any desk job and you can at least somewhat mitigate the damage in a desk job. My cousin is a bricklayer and has severe medical problems in his 30s (though he does earn more than me).
Also the physical toll of working in a trade can't be underestimated.
My brother is 4 years younger than me, dropped out of high school, and makes a TON of money mowing lawns and doing pools and HVAC work in Florida.
That lifestyle ages you fast though. I have plenty of energy to be physically active after work and have no aches/pains to speak of. I wouldn't give that up for the money he makes. And that physical divide is only going to get bigger as we age.
Indeed, the trades people who are my age, mid 50's, tend to be broken and hobbling. It might work in a country with a strong safety net, retirement system, and health care system, otherwise forget it. Trades people have a double whammy of working in a weak-labor country to begin with, and then having to work for typically small family owned businesses that skirt the labor laws and offer no career opportunities for non family members.
But the trades also include indoor trades such as medical technicians and assistants.
I'm not sure if you are implying negative connotation to "culture" because of an identity politics view that blue collar workers are a bunch of uneducated racist white guys, or if bigoted elites in general look down on labor jobs. Either way, both are elitist and bigoted views.
IMO, they’re not so socially undesireable as they’re hard physical work and parents/kids aren’t motivated to work that hard when an AC office awaits a liberal arts grad.
My father didn’t want me to follow grandpa and be farmer or carpenter because it was a hard life. Most hvac, plumber, electricians I’ve known were following in family footsteps because it was lucrative and they were raised in it. It’s non-trivial to break into, physically demanding and years of apprenticing before you can go your own way.
It can be done, and there are great opps for those who can stick with it for 5 years. And like all trades, your market is growing because all the old guys are getting old.
Do you have a source for this? It's commonly stated, but I've read that earnings for trades are over-stated. Just googling around, it looks like a plumber around here makes $35-70k, which I'd expect most to be able attain in an entry-level corporate job.
The allegation is that reporting on the earnings for trades have focused on how much you can make as an underwater titanium welder, instead of basic steel welding which makes up the majority of the labor market.
In my social group almost all of the parents working in the trades sent their kids to 4-year universities. Of the few who didn't, they didn't have much of a choice. The kids who didn't have the grades for college, enrolled in tradeschool.
Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.
Any parent who thinks that way is a moron. Educated uselessness is to the detriment of the kid.
If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having gone to a similar university I suspect that the underwater basketweaving degree from Harvard will come with lucrative enough connections to make up for the lack of actual skills.
Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.
That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.
But I don't think one enters Harvard committed to taking underwater basketweaving. At least as an undergrad, once you're there, I would assume that, like any college, you have a wide range of courses and majors to choose from, restricted only by needing to follow "X is a prerequisite for Y" structure and possibly being required to take some core classes. (The situation would be different for graduate degrees.) So if you're at Harvard and you decide to take underwater basketweaving, that's on you.
Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.
I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.
Sure, I agree with that. But the parent was talking about, well, the parents' motivation.
The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.
Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.
Exactly. People are not extremely attentive to social status & class-adjacent stuff out of foolishness. This stuff has always been extremely important to everything job/money related.
Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.
I would say that any parent who outright rejects this logic is a moron too, probably moreso.
The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.
In the US we pretend that class doesn’t exist here. We have risen above that, you see, anybody here can become anything they want. Much the same way we pretend that racism doesn’t exist.
Anyone can move up in class, if they want to. We don’t pretend to understand or support those who would take an upper middle class background and then go work in the trades.
In most republics we pretend that class doesn't exist, and it doesn't in the rigid ways that it did previously. It does however, always exist in some form.
In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.
From the US outside looking in there is an ironic mirror of the usual commentary about US vacation time or lack of national healthcare. "Why do you accept this irrelevant bullshit?"
I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.
It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.
It's also not the case that a college education and massive debt go hand-in-hand. In most other Western countries college is either free or much less expensive.
Finally, I disagree that we should determine how "useful" a degree is based solely on its ability to help someone find a high-paying job. While it's certainly true that it's harder to find a job studying the humanities than STEM, perhaps we should consider why it is that our society places such a low value on these subjects?
Certainly in the UK, the system went in the other direction: all the "polytechnic" technical colleges training people in practical skills got uprated to "universities" years ago, and the big Blairite expansion of universities was similarly not focused on "trades".
Why? Class. Having a degree and having been to university is such a pre-requisite to being middle class here, far more so than money.
It is also a common problem that certain influential jobs preferentially recruit from certain schools; so people apply to Stanford as a prerequisite for Google just as they apply to École Nationale d'Administration if they want to be part of the French government.
Whether they'd be willing or not is another matter. I know a few though, people that have very high levels of secondary education working trades or other simple jobs because it keeps their stress levels down.
Yeah thats probably true. There are a few I'd certainly consider picking up if not only so I could manage to do work myself as opposed to hiring someone else.
> working trades or other simple jobs because it keeps their stress levels down.
Yes! People take "simple jobs" like hauling trash or cleaning sewers or welding pipes because it's stress free! Unlike those high-stress jobs at Facebook where you take the free party bus to the office, get free food, drink, gym, yoga, and massages, and even have internal message boards where you're encouraged to post about how horrible you're being treated. So stressful! I bet all of those 10xers at the FAANGS wish they could be maintenance workers.
I work for a tech company and I get no free food, no free drinks, we have gym membership partnership that basically is the retail cost of any generic gym membership (so it offers no real benefit), no free yoga, and no free massages.
No, more like a psychologist that decided to work metal for an antique car restorer, a history teacher that went to work in a store and many more examples like that.
You're cherry picking examples to suit your narrative.
For every person working at a FAANG you can probably find 1,000 working in a place with the same shitty working conditions most people are subjected to.
As a counter example cops can make $200k a year doing detail work (standing around) and retire with a pension after 20 years. There are similar situations (with lesser pay) for a lot of city and state level civil service.
There are shit jobs that will wear you down in every field. They're the jobs most people are working.
it would be interesting to see the ambition and execution discipline of a young person who made in to, and through, Stanford applied to a traditional trade. If i may use a dirty word, "disruptive" comes to mind.
There's plenty of guys that go into the trades (thinking more like welding, machining, diesel repair) that quickly start running their own truck or shop, work for themselves, maybe hire a few employees and make bank. That's what it would likely look like I imagine.
I know a guy who dropped out of HS and did this as an HVAC guy. He bought a house on a lake, a second home at the beach, and built a special garage to house his car collection. After an ugly divorce that cost him almost everything he has rebuilt (but not quite to where he was before). It takes a lot of work but it can be done. As others have observed, it's unfortunately regarded as a low-status option on the coasts
Would you be equally confused if it was phrased the other way?
"How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?"
People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life.
The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
Do you not see programming as a trade? Do you not see accounting as a trade? Nursing? Medicine? Law? Pharmacology? I would consider all of those “trades.”
The non-trade courses of study aren’t particularly popular with college students anymore. I don’t know many people with degrees in english or latin or history or philosophy. And the few that I do always planned to go to trade school (law school) so their undergrad course of study didn’t much matter.
Computer software development has none of the characteristics of a profession, either. There's no licensure, no guild, no liability, and many people practice it without formal training.
The software industry would benefit from moving in the direction of being either a "trade" without the manual labor, or toward being a real profession, but it currently occupies a weird middle ground.
TBH I think this is a feature, not a bug. Over-credentializing coding will limit creativity. If you want a better existing paradigm, consider design (as in the broad field of design, which includes graphic, fashion, industrial, etc.)
That's fine with me because I favor the trade direction. I tell my mentees to make things in good taste that they're proud to show people, like a cabinet maker.
That might increase efficiency but I bet it would reduce joy. As someone who joined the industry for the joy aspect, not the efficiency and money aspect, that’s not very appealing to me. Besides, I think standardization is already happening and being rewarded in the form of higher salaries for people who are fluent in modern frameworks and practices.
You got me there. I guess I think of specific trades that don't have those aspects. As far as I am aware, you don't need a state license to be a machinist. But yes, you do need those things to be an electrician etc.
So I guess software development is just basically like bagging groceries. Totally informal.
See now I don’t think I’d consider grocery bagging a trade because there isn’t really any skill involved. You could pick just about any person off the street and they’d be able to bag groceries.
I’m not being contrary at all. Nor do I think I’ve grossly misunderstood the word. Haven’t you ever been to a trade show - a meeting of people from one profession?
I don’t think I’ve used the word outside of its definition:
> 3. b : the business or work in which one engages regularly : OCCUPATION
> 3. c : the persons engaged in an occupation, business, or industry
If you take your definition then all jobs are trades, in which case why do you think we have the word trade if it doesn’t add any new meaning, and what do you think a ‘profession‘ is?
Have you never heard people make a distinction between tradespeople and professionals?
What do you think the words in this article mean? Are they completely new concepts to you?
> A ‘profession’ historically meant the three learned professions of the Church, Medicine and the Law but today the term goes much wider and normally involves some substantial exercise of intellectual skill.
It’s quite unnecessary for you to be so condescending. Of course I’m familiar with other uses of the word. Are you? Why are you so upset by what I’ve said?
What is the distinction between a chef trained at a vocational school and a lawyer trained at a law school? Or a programmer trained at Stanford?
Chefs produce something tangible, you might say. Lawyers do, too. We draft briefs and contracts and court filings. Or maybe you’ll point out that a chef has learned a skill that takes a certain je ne sais quoi that cant be taught but can only be acquired with deliberate practice? I would say the same of programmers. (And attorneys, for that matter.) Coding is as much an art as it is a science.
And I don’t think the document you’ve linked excludes professional trades. Lawyers and doctors and programmers all provide a service:
> ‘Trade’ therefore takes its ordinary meaning, which normally involves commercial operations by a trader who provides goods or services to his or her customers in exchange for a reward.
> What is the distinction between a chef trained at a vocational school and a lawyer trained at a law school?
One is considered by society to be a 'tradesperson', while the other is considered a 'professional'. Society considers law to not be a 'trade' because it is a 'profession' instead and society sees these as mutually exclusive by definition.
I think what you really mean is you don't agree with society's definitions. That's fine - it's an interesting discussion and I didn't express any opinion on it myself. But I don't think you were ever really mistaken about what the original comment meant - you were feigning confusion as a rhetorical device, which is why I think other people down-voted you.
I'd say the defining feature of a trade show is businesses demonstrating their specialized products for members of the profession. The word "show" is also important here.
Without that, a meeting of a profession is commonly called a conference.
The distinction is purely a classist one. But functionally speaking, going to nursing school (a trade school) and going to medical school (a professional school) are the same concept, but with one side rebranding themselves as to not be associated with the lower class variant of their work.
You’re right there is a legitimate distinction, but maybe we should stop. It is 2020 and thinking you’re “better” than other people for relatively arbitrary reasons is passé.
Yes there's still some funny distinctions being made - like in the UK some apartments are advertised as 'professionals only' and only 'professionals, teachers, and police officers' are allowed to sign and witness some documents I believe for some reason.
The list of people who can witness passport applications in the UK is quite interesting. It's got all the usual jobs you'd expect (lawyers, doctors, clergy etc.) and then a set of other jobs which are wildly diverse: childminders, for example, accountants, military officers...
The common factor turns out to be accountability. If the childminder falsely certifies an application, Ofsted will revoke her registration for dishonesty. A military officer will be cashiered. A teacher sacked and added to the barring list. So even those posts which are not 'professional' have enough consequences for acting falsely that the state relies on them to be honest.
I worry about the effects on economic mobility, and eventually on overall per-capita productivity, in a world where we stop encouraging as many people to pursue higher education.
Yes, there are people today that wind up with college debt and don't have a correspondingly higher income to pay it off. But there are other solutions to address this problem, like lowering the costs of college to where they were just a couple of decades ago. Or perhaps changing the framework by which loans are made (e.g. if college loans were simply dismissible in bankruptcy, default rates would skyrocket and lenders would not be able to hand out such large sums of money so easily, and colleges would have to adapt by lowering their costs). And on average, people with degrees still earn more than those without, and enough more to pay off a loan over time. We should be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In a world where college is no longer normalized as the default option for a moderately ambitious 18-year-old, aren't we just reverting to how things worked for hundreds of years until quite recently? The kids from upper class families will continue to go to Ivy League schools, but kids from middle class and poorer families will be told from a young age that their path is to go to a trade school, or get an apprenticeship. College is too expensive and not worth it for them, so they won't even try. It just seems like a step backwards.
Lastly, I will admit I'm somewhat personally invested in this topic, and I take some offense at the idea of useless degrees. My partner grew up lower-middle class, neither of their parents went to college, but they took out a lot of money in loans and got an English Literature degree (which I believe is a commonly-agreed useless degree). If it had not been for the encouragement of teachers, and basically society at large that college is a good idea, they could have very easily not gone and just gotten an entry level job in their home town instead. Now they have a great, high-paying career in tech working in sales and operations. One very successful founder I worked for in the past had a philosophy degree (as did many other famous people in tech, like Reid Hoffman). Every job, but especially a job in sales or management/leadership, requires working with, understanding, and motivating other people. Many liberal arts degrees focus on exactly this.
Dismissing any degree outside of science, technology, or medicine as being as useless as "underwater basket weaving" is just absurd.
People don't grasp how good America has it for jobs. I have a friend in Australia who emigrated recently and struggling to even get an interview. This is a guy with intellect through the roof, ex-Microsoft, ex-Amazon software engineer and has trouble finding someone who can hire him.
In my personal contact graph - every engineer I know who has graduated (even with C grades) has obtained a job and is happy with what they're doing. If they have loans, I am sure they're paying them off.
Not to mention the opportunity cost of people not being able to start families, buy homes, etc. Go ahead and collect the future economic value of people’s education, but I won’t be surprised when “middle class” America is then too tapped out to support the consumerist economy.
Only people I see having kids are those with strong, secure incomes, or those with no prospects at all. The cohort in the middle earning $40k to $120k doesn’t feel secure enough, or at least not until their 30s.
The "underwater basket weaving" degrees will disappear if students have to pay for those degrees themselves.
I'm not really understanding students who take on loans they cannot realistically pay back. Finding the salary and job prospects for various majors is a literally trivial google search away. How can one go through 4 years of college and never check this?
The student debt problem has little to do with the people who go to elite universities. Let me give a slightly biased plug to my nephew's documentary on the problem, Fail State (https://failstatemovie.com/), produced by Dan Rather. He started out making a movie about student debt in general, and found that the problem was so much worse for poorer people attending for-profit colleges that he had to change his focus. See also his latest project, https://www.defendstudents.org/stories
>In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes.
Actually this has been true for many decades, not just the last 10-20 years. The issue is exasperated due to massive unemployment because of the mismanagement of covid19.
There will be no 're-examining' because there is so much bloat that votes. Countless administrators that actually vote for their interests, at the expense of the students. It's systemic and just like police reform, it's not going to be an easy and fast change. When renovating the system, there are losers and those losers will fight you tooth and nail to prevent progress.
It's partly why I like creative models like Lambda School. There is a massive opportunities for business(es) to help fix this gap but...again, incentives are not static.
A business helping you get a high skilled job, might want cheaper labor, so they flood the market with more workers, which reduces the collective in that field.
In conclusion, these issues are massive/systemic. It's entrenched to society and protected by stakeholders. Effectively making change happen won't be easy and we may be creating a 'wake-a-mole' type environment where we solve today's problems and gain two problems tomorrow.
Not that many decades. For example, I was an undergraduate in 1988-1992. I never had any student loans nor did my parents pay for my tuition. They made it a point of principle that we pay for our education ourselves by working part time, as they themselves had done. But that just isn't possible today. When I went to (public) university, the tuition was under $2000/semester. These days it is over $10000. Wages have gone up since then, but not 5X.
IMHO since removing the gold standard (1970s), this problem came up. I'm glad you have been able to but that possibility was shrinking every year. Less and less people were able to do what you did, starting in the 70s. Financial college administrators kept up with inflation whereas jobs didn't. Income didn't. Expenses took a little time to catch up with inflation as well. So, that might've been why for your situation. It wasn't extremely prohibitive but the issue compounds every year.
Could you speak about administrators that vote for their own interests. I always suspected this is the case, have you seen it first hand or is close to it.
> Could you speak about administrators that vote for their own interests.
So, given the rising costs of Health Care and College both situations are good examples of this. The rising 'costs' are more people in administration. This could be blamed on regulation among other issues (greed).
As for voting in their self interests, I live in California now. University of California is the #1 employer in this State. This doesn't happen by chance. It happens due to stakeholders. Many people in this States want an 'easy' and 'stable' job. The easiest way to do this is require more red tape (regulation/'initiatives'/etc), in the name of 'progress' and then now you just created a 'stable and easy' job to make sure certain quotas are reach.
Professors and students lose out due to admin workers are more aggressive on making the government enrich their interests.
Dunno if Americans have this but almost every degree at my university is “co-op” which means every other term is a paid full time job you have to seek out and get. And you have no summers. The result is that I graduated with two years of real work experience.
It’s a total game changer. It blows my mind how people can graduate with a degree and have no guarantee of any work experience. No idea how you turn that into a career.
I've heard of it at some more technical institutions (often not 4 years degrees), but I don't think anyone in the top ~100 in CS has considered the model.
It's not like it's hard for CS students to get internships in the summer...
You won't change the education issues in the US at the very top of the pyramid. The problems with US education begin at day 1 of kindergarten and the complete balkanization of curriculums both from state to state and often between different school districts in the same state.
There wasn't even a coherent line throughout elementary and middle school in Orange County. One year, 1/3 of our curriculum was geology, which was 90% of what we covered last year. More flabbergasted than concerned. It was more stressful because I was nervous about which classes were going to be hard and which easy and then that curve ball comes along and i dont know what to think!
Yes, my children are in grammar school. First: They focus almost exclusively on Math and Reading. Important subjects to be sure, but history, science, social studies etc are little more than an afterthought.
And as you said, a significant part of the begining of the year simply covers what was done the previous year. I'd prefer they simply provided a summer curriculum of 2 or 3 hours a week of such work if review is necessary, which would also eliminate the complete discontinuity from one scho year to the next. I'm fortunate that We can do so on our own, piecing together that sort of thing, but plenty of working parents have neither the time, or ability, or inclination to compose their own mini summer curriculum.7
While I would like this, I don't see this happening. Universities are stonewalling the complaints for lowered tuition. It's in a private university's best interest to keep their schools away from being "career preparation" institutions.
Of course universities will fight against anything that cuts into their income streams. That doesn't mean they'll win though. Market forces can't solve all problems, but they may solve this one.
The top prestigious universities don't have any real competition though. I don't see mid tier colleges suddenly creating a paradigm shift any time soon.
> since the vast majority of jobs don’t really need a college degree.
This is the unfortunate part to me. I see a large amount of "not minimum wage, but not that great either" jobs require bachelors that the average person could probably do with a HS education, or jobs wanting advanced professional degrees that are paying pennies and probably don't require much more skills than from a bachelors or even associates programs.
And then there's a number of fields where highly skilled (and proven) individuals can't get the better job because they don't have the right degree.
The problem with "part of the population being disenfranchised" is that it includes the some of the parts/minorities that we officially care about (unlike, say, poor white boys in areas that vote for The Other Party).
If a solution can be found where these minorities can instead go and learn something actually useful, I'm all for burning the current university system to the ground.
Can the trades support a sea change in employment/education that leads to a massive new labor supply while maintaining high wages? My guess is probably not based on the scale of change you’re suggesting. America’s labor market is fundamentally broken, and the issues with higher education are only a symptom.
> Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes.
I think it astounding how we humans are swayed in the information/meme/idea wind.
>Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level.
I'm a parent with children that are five, seven and nine.
I don't think this at all. Basically what happens is that I'm able to afford to pay tutors and nannies and therapists to help with schooling during the day, but most parents are not. This means my kids have a massive advantage that may never be caught up.
Things would be much worse if my children were in their final two years of high school, where college applications are going to be based on "performance" which basically means "did my parents have enough money to continue giving me a decent education when the state failed to do so".
At the same time, I'm also aware of what is happening from the other side of things. One of my children has fairly severe autism and is supposed to have a full-time para-educator assigned to them to help him cope with school. I say "supposed" because it's not happened yet (since late February/ early March) and looks very unlikely to happen for the school year coming in September, no matter how many people I harrass. I also want to add that they have an IEP that is legally binding, and failing to provide services is literally illegal, yet nothing has been done to help with this.
In my case, I (again, insane privilege levels here) can cause enough problems with lawyers and talking to school board members directly that my own son will hopefully be okay but I really worry about any child that has special needs right now and is being ignored or underserved because no one seems to make them a priority.
It's honestly heartbreaking. My son still sets his alarm clock every single day to get up for a school that doesn't exist. He doesn't understand why all of his teachers just stopped teaching him one day and he asks all the time when he will be able to go back.
Just imagine a seven year old autistic kid setting his own alarm and trying to make tomorrow be like the days he remembers. He doesn't understand that things have changed. He completely lost not just his teacher and support staff, but his private therapists and everyone else that he relied upon and that spent years convincing him they would be there to help him and that he should trust them.
The district expects him to be on a computer watching live instruction for 5.5 hours every day. He is seven. He can't manage twenty minutes. He needs someone full-time every day to help him stay on track and yet nothing has been provided and I strongly doubt anything will.
Again, I have backup plans involving hiring someone full-time to teach him. We are insanely, ridiculously lucky to be able to do this. My concern is for all of the other kids who don't have parents that can spend tens of thousands of dollars on teachers and lawyers to fight for their own children. It's so, so wrong that these children, the most vulnerable of all, are being so neglected by the system.
Fuck. That was a rant. My inclination is to delete everything I said here but I think it's important. This virus (and more importantly, the utterly inept, almost criminal lack of response and leadership) is causing enormous, potentially-permanent damage to many, many students, and the only kids that are going to improve are those with parents with plenty of money to shield them.
Thank you for post. Sorry for the struggle. The hope is that this is temporary, studies have shown that missing a year of education dissipates into noise after 10 years.
Although, that was during a time when that 1 year wasn’t just full of netflix (hopefully this is only very rare, and that most parents aren’t just having the young watch TV all day).
Great, more mindless drones without a wide picture of things in their heads, way to go for the modern slave drivers. Preheating for predefined occupations assigned at birth, the digital caste way.
Ever noticed how the most agenda-aligned comments are always at the top? HN has become the most disgusting indoctrination platform in the whole IT, and the day will come when it'll burn up in colourful flames.
A sea of change, my ass! Better be prepared for the ocean of backlash for all the crap you're being peddling.
I feel like I can offer a unique perspective on this because I go to Notre Dame and we are just finishing the first week of classes with everyone back on campus. It's gone alright so far. All the cases so far have been traced back to off campus bars or parties. However, I expect it to get worse soon as cases start spreading on campus. If you want to see how Notre Dame is doing with cases and testing we have a dashboard here: https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/
I really hope we can make this work because, as an electrical engineer, most of my classes can't be moved online.
Yea pretty much. However, I would extend that to off campus students as well because as soon as someone has a really severe case (or dies) then we will probably all be sent home.
Also it's not just bars or parties. You also have to worry about other gatherings. If people don't where masks and social distance those can become a problem as well. However, so far people have been mostly responsible with other on campus gatherings.
Technically it could work if they keep distance and wear masks, but as it looks like this has proven to be pretty difficult for people aged 20-30 so far, mostly because the impact of COVID for them is fairly low.
Or it may work because there’s close to zero chance of dying for college students, and we have far more immune people now than we did back in the spring. Sweden’s numbers are looking very interesting right now.
College students can easily spread it to vulnerable populations.
1. Some live at home.
2. Some will go shopping. Some in places without mask mandates.
3. Older professors and staff (custodial, food services, advisors) will be pressured to work (you probably can't just say "I'm not teaching" without quitting).
4. Some may need to use public transit to get to the school. Again also in some places without mask mandates.
5. And of course, some students are vulnerable. Many schools are not allowing remote work when they open.
Add in dorms being super spreader environments and you've got disasters waiting to happen.
There are a lot fewer people to spread it to now than there was in March.
The USA is over 5M confirmed cases now. The CDC estimates that the true infection count is 6x-24x that. So on the order of 30M - 120M Americans have already had it now.
The distribution is uneven. Places that hadn't gotten hit are getting hit now. But on average we are likely close to herd immunity.
This is no longer an exponential thing here. We can't have an OOM more cases. It's mathematically impossible. The worst is over (again, on average). I don't think we explicitly tried to follow a herd immunity strategy but that is what ended up happening.
but is that reason good enough to take away everyone's right to go to college?
here is where personal responsibility comes into play. If you are concerned stay home. The university and laws should support you.
But the solution is not to punish everyone else, that won't work long term. The sooner people realize that the better. Limiting and collectively taking away people's rights will cause far more trouble long term.
Everybody at every college is saying that it could work if the students behave themselves when they're not in class. Then in the next breath, they say: It can't work.
Oddly enough I went to ND for grad school, though it was many years ago. The campus was isolated from the surrounding town, but not completely isolated.
The numbers, though very few, seem to fit an exponential well, at least thus far.
If you plot and fit the curve to such an exponential, today you should have ~15 cases. Tomorrow ~25 cases. In one week's time, ~380 cases. ND has ~8600 people attending. To get that many cases should be 14 days from today [0], so August 28th.
If these trends continue as is, then ND won't make it to September before closing down.
Still, the data is sparse.
[0] Day 20 is ~6000 cases, day 21 is ~9400 cases, you can round however you'd like.
This just points to the absurdity of the whole situation. I mean in what world should bars be open and universities closed? It’s a complete failure of priorities.
We should be spending the entire defense budget on paying for people to stay home, stay safe, and to get them what they need; as well as funding as much scientific research as feasible to fight this clear and present danger to our lives and livelihoods.
As we saw in Italy and New York, COVID-19 has the potential to overwhelm hospitals. Officially, almost 170,000 Americans have died. NYTimes estimates that COVID-19 already caused over 200,000 deaths by comparing against the expected number of deaths if we weren't in a pandemic. So yes, COVID-19 is a clear and present danger to our lives.
Even the very highest estimates of asymptomatic infection don't put it anywhere near that high, unless you're talking about only the first few days or some such.
Sorry, I meant the traditional definition of "conservative" with regard to media, which is to say ensuring that only unbiased facts are reported as best as possible.
I grew up in South Bend, and most of the 'Fighting Irish' near campus bars are way too small for social distancing. Pre-covid, all of them were shoulder to shoulder packed with students and locals. Please be careful celnardur. It's a wonderful place and campus, enjoy your time there.
It used to be the case that even if you took out massive student loans to attend elite schools, at least the in-person experience and networking opportunities would be worth it.
Now you don’t even get that. You get some bullshit online instruction that is little more than a glorified MOOC, and when you finally graduate, you have to compete for remote jobs with people from all across the country, and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts because the cost of living in their area is practically negligible.
Meanwhile, you have to keep paying for that massive student loan for most of your life with cash flow that comes in well below your expectations, wrecking your ability to save money and making retirement a distant fantasy that is about as probable as the dreams people have of becoming multi-millionaires.
This should be an outrage, but no one will care. This will be the generation that takes it on the chin.
> and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts
More like:
underbid by people whose skills are indistinguishable from yours.
This is the same problem we've always had with remote work. As was explained to me, your salary is paid by someone who can't decide what your value is. If you don't know what something is worth, or in fact for, you might as well get the cheap one.
Networking doesn’t have to be in person. Facebook, twitter, linkedin, even hn work also. Facebook even started by facilitating intra college networking.
Stanford student here. The answer is _yes_ -- afaik, they've extended the deferral deadline to August 19th to give people enough time to make a decision.
Maybe if you don’t have loans or scholarships. This late in the game it’s almost certain that the loans and scholarships are cashed for the the bill by now
College students have to be somewhere. They don't magically disappear when schools are closed. So this just means they will be getting infected and transmitting the virus in other places. How is that better?
Navigating dorms often requires close contact (elevators, dining halls, shared bathrooms, shared rooms). Social gatherings in near-campus bars, fraternities, and on campus parties will invite infection, as party events at various summer hotspots have demonstrated already. Classrooms are probably the easiest venues of campus infection to mitigate.
The virus doesn't spread at a constant rate just because people exist.
An infected person comes into contact with other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus. Those people, in turn come into contact still other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus to them, etc.
At a school, groups of students form, both officially (e.g., in classes) and unofficially (socially), often in ways that are friendly for transmitting the virus. Then groups reform (students go to their next class, or meet with another group of friends or attend another activity), then reform again... and again... and again, etc.
Of course, this doesn't entirely go away when students are off campus. But the transmission vectors are so much smaller -- classes and groups for. other organizations don't occur; social groups tend to be smaller, more stable and with less overlap into other groups.
More or less, the "top" universities have maintained an ecosystem that attracts so many people over the course of their live and makes people believe that's the "road" to a better life. The problem is not about the pandemic, it's about what's in the mind of average people. People start to have doubts. It doesn't really matter what's the decision afterwards. People start to think about the next level things.
I think by this point we can guess what their intent, generally, is: to keep the money. Schools have had plenty of time to say that tuition will be reduced if the campuses are closed, but I have yet to find a single major school announcing this.
I lived in Cary for a long time and also attended NCSU for grad school. I've been following the conversation on related sub-reddits and it seems like the biggest concern is what students are doing when they're not on campus: parties, crowded gatherings down Hillsborough St, etc. Community spread will still happen ... just that campus activities will not be the main driver.
I'm a current student at NC State, and have been relatively satisfied with the University's planning and policies on paper...
That said, this is obviously a cash grab, and they're ignoring that students aren't going to follow their rules when they're off campus (Hillsborough St, parties, as you said above.)
I've already seen it happening... this isn't going to go well.
The difference is the state government. Stanford doesn't exactly oppose the state's guidance, but I think their announcement makes it clear that they would have opened the campus if the state guidance had been a bit less strict.
My experience in engineering grad school (industrial) was that the most valuable things I learned were engineering econometrics and statistical simulation, both of which apply to nearly everything.
Reduce prices. Expand the number of students. Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus. Heck, even "gender studies" degrees do not require it, if you'd like more of that.
This is once in a decade opportunity to increase the throughput, _and_ increase the quality of their creme de la creme (because with more throughput more high performing outliers will randomly be caught). And they'll 100% squander it.
> Most STEM work does not require that you be present on campus
I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. Most engineers (not software engineers) I've talked too said they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously.
And that's why I said "most" STEM and not just "STEM". I'm sure labs could be set up to do experimental work. You just don't need the rest of the campus (and the blood sucking administrators that go with that).
> they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously
They would, if that was the only degree available. And I'm sure Stanford, of all places, can do it as well as anybody.
> I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well.
True, you can't. But I have a BS degree in physics, and I took a grand total of one physics lab in four years. (I also took one in chemistry.) True, that's not engineering. But then, most math people don't take many labs at all.
So maybe this is true of the "TE" parts of STEM, and not so true of the "SM" parts.
The self-righteous smugness on display in this thread about what is valuable to learn and what isn’t is mind boggling. Apparently humility and curiosity about things you don’t know aren’t on the stem curriculum y’all took
I am currently trying to convince a friend with teenagers that the 'going away' part of 'going away to college' is part of the entire point.
Keeping your kid in town is just infantilizing them. And god knows we have enough enfants terribles in the world, and especially in tech.
She's going to end up with a 28 year old son still living at home playing video games all day, while his degree rots away, wondering what went wrong. Maybe I should start logging dates and conversations. "Here it is, July 15th, 2019..."
sorry, but this is wildly out of touch. going to a local university while living at home is not infantilizing anyone. it is a very financially smart and sensible plan that meets the needs for many people's goals in life. balancing classes, extracurriculars, a job, and other college activities that don't depend on your living situation is more than enough of sampling what "adulting" is like
not everyone needs to, or can, move across the country for school living in their own place right out of high school
There's a huge financial difference between going to school at a better school in-state than going out of state. I went to school an hour from home.
And if we're going to talk about out of touch, I'm not sure where you're from where you think everyone who goes to school has a university in the same town as them, let alone with the degree program they want to attend. Changing your degree to one that's 'good enough' so you can stay in town? That's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment.
As far as I've heard, parking on campus at my alma mater is even worse than when I attended, so being 10 minutes off campus is more conceptual than factual. It's probably true that Uber is far cheaper than a dorm, even if you averaged 3 rides a day, especially these days, but there are loads of semi-spontaneous interactions that become stilted when you have to worry about getting back and forth across town. It's not doing your own laundry, it's the people you meet while doing your laundry.
> Changing your degree to one that's 'good enough' so you can stay in town? That's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment.
This is exactly what I did.
I went to a good school and was in a great program for getting my Software Engineering degree. But it was expensive, student life seemed detached from reality, and I was piling on debt. I decided to leave and live with my parents while attending a commuter school and getting what many would consider a lesser degree while working 2-3 jobs at a time. Many people (including myself at times) thought I was heading down the wrong road, and had questioned my decisions.
I ended up with very little debt, had multiple job offers by my junior year, and now I'm living a life I could only dream of. I don't mean to toot my horn or whatever, I just think that what you said isn't always the case. I have no regrets for getting a 'good enough' degree, and think it was one of the best decisions of my life for various reasons.
My immediate thought to your comment was that "frosh" is actually very common and accepted slang for "freshmen". That said, I did not expect to see it in the article's lede – or in the president's official statement [0]:
> We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter.
I imagine that's because "freshmen" is problematic in $CURRENT_YEAR, but it sounds too weird to say "freshpeople" so they went with the existing slang of "frosh."
Considering it's a term that originated centuries before women were first allowed to attend college, I suppose it's reasonable to argue it has been long obsolete to the point of being problematic.
University administrators have now begun the process of replacing the terms “freshman” and “upperclassman” with the gender-neutral terms “first year” and “upper-level students” in official campus publications... “It’s really for public, formal correspondence and formal publications … we’re not trying to tell people what language to use in their everyday casual conversations,” Chun said. “We’re not trying to be language police.”
Although frosh refers to a first-year student and has a resemblance to fresh, freshman is not believed to be the source of the word. More likely, frosh is from the dialectic German word for a frog, Frosch. ... Students already had a slang term for freshman, the diminutive freshie.
The question "what it is slang for" is different from the question "what is the word derived from". The prior may well change if everyone has a group delusion and believes it is slang for something different. The latter obviously not.
Let the college kids get sick. They are extremely unlikely to have any serious effects from covid. At least on a college campus they won’t infect older family members. Herd immunity on campus would be reached very quickly. The few with serious preexisting conditions can stay home until that happens.
The level of fear is frankly ridiculous. People get sick and people die. One day, we will all die. That is the human condition. Life must go on. This is not the Black Death. A 1% fatality rate, mostly of people already on the cusp of death, is not a reason to bring society to a halt, to lock children inside for months.
They are relatively unlikely to _die_ from COVID-19 (and please do not repeat the false claim that these are only “people already on the cusp of death” - the average victim is losing at least a decade of life based on actuarial data) but we know that there are a much greater percentage of people who will experience significant health problems, potentially with life-long impacts.
Similarly, not everyone on or near campus is a health 19 year old and not every college student can afford to live in their own apartment or with a few healthy roommates. Universities have large numbers of staff of all ages, and no college town functions without a similar all-ages mix of people living near those students. The entire reason why there's so much pressure to re-open is because the lack of federal support means that city and state governments (at least 30 of the states have recent laws preventing them from running a budget deficit during a crisis) are desperate for the revenue generated by those students, and that is another way of saying that lots of people are literally banking on having those students be in contact with a fair chunk of the local economy.
> we know that there are a much greater percentage of people who will experience significant health problems, potentially with life-long impacts
This seems to be an alarmist statement. Any disease with a fever component will leave a small percentage with long term damage, same for diseases affecting the lungs.
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
Scary headlines sell papers. I read recently on the BBC about brain damaged covid patients. There were less than 50 in a country of 50+ million. That is not a "much greater percentage".
It does everyone a disservice to spread exaggerated fear.
> It does everyone a disservice to spread exaggerated fear.
And so does poo-pooing risk when you have no actual numbers.
Every infectious disease expert I've heard from is puzzled by this disease. The variance of individual outcomes from expected norms is simply impossible to predict. Taking unnecessary risk is the act of a fool.
If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
There are lots of numbers on the flu and other infection diseases that cause the same problems. Here's a paper I just looked up for another comment talking about heart inflammation from influenza, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Granted I learned more than I wanted to know about the complications around influenza, and that the numbers are more significant thanI though, but my opinion is reinforced that covid is nothing out of the ordinary for these types of viruses.
>If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
You asked me about numbers, and now I would like to ask you the same question. What do you mean by even a small chance? Does that small chance include the risk every year from the flu, with all the related complications and possible long term effects? We don't shut the world down every year for that.
I'm not meaning to "poo-poo" risk. I want to quantify it. I'd like an intellectually rigorous response to the situation. I feel like the danger from covid relative to other similar diseases has been exaggerated, so many alarming headlines, for the clicks, not put into context, etc.
I always hear "much greater percentage" type language when referring to long-term effects of COVID-19. Is there an actual number associated with this? Or is it more so guesswork
It’s by definition unfalsifiable (since the long term since March hasn’t arrived yet). Which makes it a great talking point for people looking to spread fear.
We know that there are people who take a long time to recover. This is pretty widely reported but we don’t know how long that will end up taking or what permanent impacts there are since it’s a new disease and treatment options are being rapidly pursued.
There are studies looking at permanent changes to various bodily systems - see for example, this one finding cardiac differences in recovered patients:
There are similar concerns for liver damage, reduced lung capacity, and neurological effects.
Obviously it’s too soon to have high precision numbers for this or level of impact on the rest of someone’s life but it definitely means that the deniers’ favorite framing of the outcomes as 99% ok, 1% fatal is leaving out a lot for the sake of political correctness.
"We know that there are people who take a long time to recover."
There are people who take a long time to recover from rhinovirus. The question is, at what rate? You'll note that this is not covered in the articles you have linked.
We simply don't have the data -- what we have is a small number of anecdotes, and a bunch of news organizations who are willing to write speculative stories before we know anything. But you could write the same kinds of speculative stories about any illness, if you chose to look.
That JAMA article has serious methodological flaws, by the way: their "Covid" cohort has twice the number of smokers as their "risk-factor matched" group, almost twice as many men, more people with COPD, high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension...and they report their results in terms of absolute numbers of defects observed. The reported differences between those groups is smaller in magnitude than the number of smokers. It's frankly embarrassing that JAMA chose to publish the study.
This is a new disease which is still early in the research cycle but I find it somewhat puzzling that in such a climate you're expecting a higher burden of proof for people urging caution than the reverse, especially given that the medical community and researchers are generally urging caution.
> "I think it's an argument for why we take this disease so seriously," says Dr. Poland. "People who are thinking, especially young people: '(It's a) mild disease, you know. I might not even have any symptoms, and I'm over it.' Whoa. The data is suggesting otherwise. There's evidence of myocardial damage, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, decreased ejection fractions, pulmonary scarring and strokes.
I'd tend to think that a doctor at the Mayo Clinic who has relevant education, experience, and is actively working in the response has better instincts for whether we should be taking this seriously.
"I find it somewhat puzzling that in such a climate you're expecting a higher burden of proof for people urging caution than the reverse, especially given that the medical community and researchers are generally urging caution."
I have the same standard that I apply everywhere: the burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claims. I don't care if that person is a hypochondriac telling me about secret herbal cures for cancer, or medical doctors who haven't done their statistics correctly. When I can look at the data myself and see that they haven't done their math right, I disregard their opinions.
Having spent my fair share of time "in the medical community", I'm here to tell you that there are plenty of doctors and nurses and professors out there who are more than willing to give a reporter a salacious quote just to get their name in the press or their paper in a better journal. Doctors are humans too: they rush to judgment, fall victim to bias, and get dazzled by the idea of seeing their name in print.
So far we have a few (mostly bad) papers describing a small number of the most serious cases, a few (really bad) papers that have gone on statistical fishing expeditions, and an absolutely credulous news media, willing to amplify any speculative claim for clicks. So no, I don't cede my critical thinking skills to an authority figure, just because that figure is in a lab coat.
The life expectancy of someone who is 75 is ~12 years [0]. Do we really want to argue that that decade of someone's life has no value because they're "on the cusp of death"?
A 1% mortality rate in the US (if everyone gets it) is 4 million people. The US fought the longest war in their history over 3000 deaths.
That all is ignoring permanent, non-fatal damage. There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infections do long-term damage, even to healthy people. I'm reasonably healthy and young, and neither my lungs nor my sense of smell have recovered fully since I had it in March. Are you really arguing to sacrifice the quality of life of millions of people at the altar of economic progress?
>There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infections do long-term damage, even to healthy people
It is already a known fact that diseases with fever and/or lung components leave a small percentage of people with long term damage. Covid is like the flu in this regard.
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
It seems that people are surprised that this happens, and/or think covid is different in degree. The numbers I have seen so far are quite small and unsuprising, for example less than 50 people with long-lasting fever damage in a country of 50+ million.
Do you have any sources claiming covid is different in this regard than any other fever/lung disease?
Would you consider 60-78% to be a small percentage?[1] Do you have any evidence suggesting that the flu's rate of long-term cardiovascular consequences is similar?
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Like I said, covid is no different than the flu in this regard. The above linked paper is full of other case studies showing similar data, from 1918 to the 2000s.
While reading up on your citation I found tons of literature out there talking about how common this is with other bacterial and viral infections.
EDIT: I grant that the numbers for myocardial inflammation are not insignificant. I'm learning as I go. But I'll stand by my opinion that covid is not (historically) anything out of the ordinary, just another coronavirus that made the jump to people, like so many before, and lockdowns are not going to eradicate it.
Even Cuomo mentioned in April that closing down colleges and having students return to live with, in some case, elderly relatives, may not have been the best public health policy.
Tomorrow you have a .0001% chance of dying. Care to increase that to 1%? (E.g. walking through a bad thunderstorm.) Or 10% (Walking through a battlefield or in the middle of a busy superhighway.) Then are you willing to live with that level of risk every day for the next nine months? In time, increased risk adds up to real danger.
You also overlook the many people on campus who are over age 30 -- all profs, and most academic and support staff. Infected students will mix with them and increase their risk to a dangerous degree that none of them would welcome.
Or are you thinking that you can run a college with only students and no staff? Dream on.
nothing is capped during an ongoing pandemic but yeah given we're seeing around 40% asymptomatic, 1% seems about right if not a little on the high side.
Yes of course there will be, any diseases could cause long term health conditions in some of population. Flu too can cause long term damage too. But does it justify lockdown ? closing down school ? No. Especially when its still unclear and lacking in stats.
>why should we even have bothered eradicating polio?
Because it doesn't require locking down significant part of the population...
Is there a rational reason behind this? The hyper scary emotional reaction is to close everything down, but given the at risk population is well understood- is this a money grab?(less brick and mortar costs)
The 70 year old professors and obese 50 year old professors clearly are able to online teach, why make everyone lose?
Heck if students went to college we'd get closer to herd immunity.
(All from a US perspective)
There's been a crazy notion floating around from the start on this, that we can either keep our normal activities/economy (jobs, businesses, schools, etc) or deal with the pandemic.
However, you can't have anything normal unless the pandemic is under control. Because until it is, so many kinds of normal activities will be hit by an outbreak, and then your normal activity will fall apart and stop.
I think we could have had school this fall. But it would have meant much more serious efforts months ago, building up our fast testing capabilities, a commitment to ongoing mask, social distancing, and other mechanisms to control the spread (mandates, really).
Kind of missing the point of what it means to "get it under control"
You will have spread no matter what you do. The question is how much.
If prevalence of the virus is high, then the risk of spread is higher. At a high level of prevalence any systematically repeating and mixing groupings of people (such as school) is pretty much guaranteed to lead to an outbreak, which will stop or at least seriously disrupt and hinder that system (not to mention the sick and dead people from the outbreak).
At a low level or prevalence outbreaks will still occur, but only here and there. Some schools will have outbreaks and have to stop, but most will be able to keep going.
Widely available tests with fast turnaround is also part of this because it allows outbreaks to be detected earlier, when they are much smaller, which limits the disruption each outbreak causes (not to mention the deaths and sickness).
The point of all this is to have most of our normal activities and economy until a safe and effective vaccine is widely available.
Did they confirm this? I could also see issues with someone asymptomatic who was quarantined, but was at the 99th percentile for incubation period. With an R0 near 1, with enough people, you could miss the virus for even a few months.
It's really hard to contain, and NZ will likely be dealing with case like this on and off until there's a vaccine.
Read about 'flattening the curve'.
My dental hygienist, whom I spoke to this week, has a daughter at one of the community colleges, in a transfer program where she does 2 years at the CoCo and then gets admitted to one of the state colleges to finish her degree. All of her classes are online. She's delighted with it. She takes classes at home while also caring for her little sister, while Mom works.
I would much rather just suck it up and enter the workforce at this point. I don't know what I'd do with myself for the year, and I don't have enough credits to speedrun my degree in the spring. There's also some conflicting information about if I would keep my financial aid. I haven't taken the time to dig into it, because at that point I decided it wasn't worth it.
the fat that gets trimmed is what makes them better.
The real “fat” is the admin bloat at most universities. Most schools will continue to be in a precarious financial situation until that fat is cut, imho.
Assuming I take 12 classes a year and my classes average 15 students each, that puts the cost of providing a single class at $58,750.
What the heck is going on for universities to have such an insane cost structure.
"Paying for the Party" is a neat book here based on real life information from colleges.
"Most" cannot.
I suspect that my employer, as well as similar universities, will be more-or-less okay.
To be sure, there will be pain. Faculty hiring, for example, will take a huge hit -- I feel bad for everyone finishing up grad school and postdocs now, and who was anticipating hitting the academic job market.
In addition, there might be layoffs of tenured faculty, and/or closure of programs like history which are deeply worth preserving but which don't generate the big bucks. You might see a lot of sports get cut -- think swimming, wrestling, golf, etc. -- not the sort which get broadcast on TV. This already happened at Stanford.
But my estimation is that we, and similar universities, do not face an existential threat. Hopefully I'm right.
The schools that are most screwed are small, non-prestigious liberal arts colleges -- most of which are not very well known. Indeed, there were already a number of such closures before the pandemic hit.
It's definitely an existential threat to the system. The reason unis might survive are 1) government aid direct and indirect 2) Unis have otherwise heavily incumbent positions and the banks will provide money, maybe on ugly terms.
Most colleges are panicking right now, this is not the kind of situation they are in any way equipped to handle.
[1] https://www.newser.com/story/289974/2/colleges-face-existent...
I'm curious: under what conditions do you think the threat to Carolina (and other similar regional flagship schools) becomes "existential"?
E.g. classes go online for the Fall semester sometime in Spring, with little hope of reopening the campus for Spring.
Forever to thee.
In my opinion, when long-term demand for a traditional university education shows signs that it will significantly decline.
I just don't think we've seen it yet. (Nor have we seen severe short-term decline in demand. Enrollment is down less than I was expecting.) There are a variety of competitors such as edX, Coursera, etc., as well as university-affiliated "startups" such as SNHU's massive online program. For the most part they haven't caught on that much, and I don't think they will.
As tuition keeps rising, it will squeeze out smaller, less prestigious, and more expensive private schools that offer (in my opinion) questionable value for money. But I'd expect many of these students to choose state schools instead.
All this said, I don't have all that much insider knowledge, just strong opinions. :)
Cheers, again. I always forget that their might be other people from SC on this board. It's refreshing to be reminded.
I fully expect a notable outbreak in some college to start a wave of media noise, followed by all the universities sending everyone back home again.
Sucks because students are signing leases, moving crap, buying meal plans, etc, right now. Aside from the obvious safety issues.
Stanford and Harvard, while offering some non-selective continuing ed / MOOC programs that leverage their name, are not looking to increase their enrollment for traditional degrees. Their exclusivity is part of their appeal.
This is the whole reason schools want students back. They’re desperate to recover some of this cash flow. They have huge budgets and vast numbers of administrative staff to pay. Without the revenue from residence leases and meal plans, they’re in real trouble.
There is a similar situation with private schools. Some of the demand comes from the fact that it is also a babysitting service, forced social group, networking opportunity for parents.
Signed a Swede who spent an exchange year in Texan upper middle class suburban public high school.
Thinking back on it I now see how thought out it was. The clock facing the school yard which everything depended on. In second and third grade every time it was PE, shop class or something requiring a different place than the homeroom it was scheduled so the teacher would bring the class if necessary, later just letting us go. Fourth and fifth it could be right after a break trusting us to get there on our own.
Then starting sixth grade we were essentially on our own. The first class started anywhere between from 8 to 10 in the assigned room. During breaks we could go anywhere, the only limit being to get back in time. Sometimes having gaps in the schedule leading to some time to kill. Often going the public library, or playing something, or hanging out in the school building or buying coke and mentos because kids....
Then choosing high school and field of study based on interests all over town getting there using public transportation, which every student that had to travel longer than a couple of kilometers is given a pass for which is valid during school hours.
Also getting the government stipend of ~$100 every month having to learn manage your own money.
Wow, this was a trip down memory lane.
One thing I vividly remember is feeling like a child again when starting American high school. A contrasting memory which stands out is during lunch getting in a friend's truck sneaking out to buy fast food for lunch and "stealthily" avoiding the parking lot monitors to not get into trouble. Wtf.
I’m in university right now. I just finished a term of online classes. I’ve definitely witnessed those benefits being enjoyed by other students but I haven’t had the time to enjoy them myself; my program is simply too difficult for that. The most I’ve enjoyed is going out for drinks with friends once a week, and maybe the occasional meal out on another night.
The ones joining frats, partying constantly, playing sports and all that must have trivial classes. Either that or they’re already so rich and privileged that they can afford to fail courses and keep going.
You'd be surprised. Unless you're with someone 24/7 you actually don't know what else they are doing. I knew a girl in college who you might think partied all the time. I mean, she was always out and about, so makes sense. Except, the few people who knew her better got to see her literally study for 24 straight hours by sleeping 15-20 minutes here and there, slam a diet mountain dew on the way to class and ace the test. These were non-trivial classes, and she graduated with a 4.0 by the way.
Was this a healthy way to go through college? I don't think so. It certainly was not how I did it. But it did show me a level of effort around studying/working I didn't think was possible, and also that what people do in private will surprise you.
I disagree completely. Some people are just inhumanly capable of balancing everything. One of the smartest people I met while in school was in a sorority and partied hard. She was also extremely successful academically and is currently attending medical school.
I also had my share of fun, but I would never have been able to keep up with her. Fortunately my academic ambitions don't go much farther than my BS in comp. sci.
Just because you can't manage the balancing act doesn't mean no one else can.
She’s the exception that proves the rule. I met at least half a dozen people in first year who partied only moderately and have since flunked out of the school. They’ve moved to other schools with less demanding programs and tried to put their lives back together.
I also met someone who studied for an entire term to pass the MCAT and got into medical school. She seemed like the type of person who really knew how to balance her life though. Not a crazy partier but someone with close friendships.
When I was in college from 2002 to 2006, the thing I heard about sororities was that joining one usually helped a GPAs, and they were really good about keeping an archive of old exams and notes.
Joining a frat hurt your GPA.
Not true at all. Perhaps they may not end up with the best GPA but they'll do good enough to get a useful degree while having a strong network. It may not have been the healthiest lifestyle for the time being, but they made it out fine.
Source: A large part of my college social circle who ended up in fruitful STEM/consulting/medicine careers.
I don't know why you're assuming this, but I'm a little insulted. I was an NCAA athlete and a common refrain I always heard was that the most valuable skill you get from it is incredible time management. I didn't kill time on sites like HN or reddit or facebook (the only social network at the time). We partied a decent amount too. About half of the particular people I played and partied with now have doctorates from world class institutions. Nearly all of us have STEM degrees.
Sound familiar? (And that was several thousand years ago)
If you are referring to the USA, I disagree. Unless the local county health departments or states require schools to go virtual, I don't see it.
If a large public university experiences an outbreak, I don't think they will go virtual until someone dies. I do not think large private schools will go virtual unless the government requires it.
The USA has no centralized method of handling the pandemic, so each state is making their own rules and guidelines. We have professional sports teams playing outside bubbles and many college football programs are continuing.
Many school districts outside urban areas are opening and seeing outbreaks, but continue to stay open. As a country, we blew it and seem to have decided to go about this piecemeal.
I hope your son and your family stay well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/12/us/georgia-school-coronav...
https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-america-blew-it-b3d84ea3-7...
When covid case counts mount on campus, there will be huge pressure from media and concerned parents to quash the threat instantly -- something impossible to do without extensive 24 hour PCR testing already being in place, which no school will have.
All it will take is images of one pretty cheerleader on a ventilator to instantly change policy for an entire region and all the schools therein. If enough parents lose faith, school will be out indefinitely.
"Along with student death, these triggers to campus closure include “significant actions” by the governor or other public officials, sharply diminished hospital capacity, testing shortages on campus and unmanageable, widespread clusters of cases."
Edit: Especially if fueled by some notable event.
Before now I would agree with you. From what has been reported schools in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Indiana are staying open after large outbreaks. These are elementary and high schools, so maybe it'll be different with universities.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/13/us/schools-quarantined-corona...
Considering every college in America takes federal student loan money this seems like a really easy place for the federal government to take decisive action to force a semester online and cap charges for the benefit of students and the federal budget.
As an aside, equally scummy are universities that pulled the rug from under students very close to move in. My sister got kicked out of her housing by the university a few days before move in, and basically had to accept that she would be staying home for the fall, as rent prices near school nearly doubled overnight.
Wait is that really what happened? I anticipated that rent prices would drop because most students would just go home and there wouldn't be a market for people wanting to live in the college part of town.
Do you mean they're still having in-person classes required but are just not offering housing? That's definitely scummy, that's the kind of thing that would have changed people's admission acceptance decisions.
No, I’m not an Asian tiger mom...wrong gender, wrong ethnicity.
Also, a gap year at this time? Fun.
I’m not saying people should go to school. I wouldn’t if I were this age. But it’s not exactly as simple as peacing out for a year and then coming back. It will be a huge mess.
Follow the money.
The colleges are getting paid regardless. The local landlords, businesses, etc. that usually get to skim easy money off college students don't. The colleges have to walk the line between screwing the students by giving them all covid (bad press -> less money) and pissing off the locals, who will just use their voting power to use the local government to take money (less favorable regulator environment -> less money) from the colleges if the colleges don't let them skim enough gravy.
Here's Notre Dame's tracker: https://here.nd.edu/our-approach/dashboard/
My theory is that the semester will be shut down just in time for nobody to get their money back (where students otherwise would have taken a gap year or something). Maybe I'm just cynical.
I agree that you are correct about this, even here in Boston we've just got so many colleges that even if the one I work at has no problems Boston in general seems likely to have a big enough uptick that it will impact everyone. That's a lot of students traveling here by plane all at once and even if they're quarantining when they arrive I bet their parents aren't...
Flu, mono, the clap. It's why you're supposed to be up to date on your vaccinations.
It's just what happens when a bunch of people who've been in separate microbiomes come together and start sharing the same air.
Happens to people who move to different countries too.
Common enough in basic training that it's got a nickname as well. https://afwm.org/life-during-bmt/bmt-illnesses/
EDIT: *infinitesimal danger
And claiming that coronavirus poses "no danger" is simply untrue. You can claim that the danger is over-stated, but young adults can and do get COVID-19
Yes, they can, and do. And they are overwhelmingly likely to have nothing more than a mild illness. The danger has been drastically exaggerated.
In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
Moreover, when you look at the data, nearly all of those deaths have significant co-morbidities.
So even assuming that the personal danger is acceptable (which isn't a given; 300 deaths sounds like a horrible and avoidable tragedy to me) death figures among healthy 20-somethings don't capture the full risk of keeping a university open.
Well now you're shifting the goalposts.
The comment was that the students are at risk. Someone shows you that they're not at risk, and you pivot to danger to "townsfolk".
Here's the thing: those students don't just disappear, and they don't stop interacting with other college-aged students, townsfolk and employees simply because they're not at school. And if you want to protect parents, shipping their kids off to live on their own seems like a better way to do that than to have those kids living at home.
(As far as "avoidable tragedies" go: during the same period that those 300 kids died of covid, literally thousands died of all other causes. More died of accidents than died of Covid. I think it's time to admit that your sense of concern is mis-calibrated.)
Assuming they're not stupid, evil, or politically conservative, the students are probably concerned about the risk of spreading the illness and the attendant harm that could cause, as well as what it could do to themselves.
Is it a human right to have a job, venture to the grocery store, and see friends and family?
Now there could be debate about whether that new number is "acceptable" or not. But we shouldn't use the success of the quarantine-like policies to argue that quarantine-like policies are unnecessary.
This is an assumption, and it's a bad one. The paucity of deaths in young people is true around the world, regardless of lockdown policy. Sweden, for example, does not have a higher proportion of young people dying.
It is well established that physical distancing limits the spread of virus transmitted via respiratory droplets. If you refute that, I would require significant peer-reviewed literature on your side. https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
It is also irrefutable that contracting COVID-19 carries risk - especially for high-risk individuals with comorbidities (yes, even young people)
Combined, I don't see how you can come up with a hypothesis where getting people together would somehow be equally as safe as keeping people apart.
Again, this is just one aspect that policy makers have to consider. There is also the economy, mental health, etc. I think having those discussions is very interesting - how much should we protect our health vs our way of life? There are very valid arguments against continuing the shut-down.
But acknowledging that social practices directly impact virus transmission is a necessary step to have meaningful discussion.
The study you provided does not support your claim that physical distancing works as it is implemented in the US (6 feet of separation).
> We found that the evidence base for current guidelines is sparse, and the available data do not support the 1- to 2-meter (≈3–6 feet) rule of spatial separation. Of 10 studies on horizontal droplet distance, 8 showed droplets travel more than 2 meters (≈6 feet), in some cases up to 8 meters (≈26 feet).
It's also likely Covid is spread by aerosols. There needs to be more research but it is very likely based on the details of superspreader events.
What assumption is that? I stated a fact that you can verify with a Google search.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1107913/number-of-corona...
Can you respond to the rest of the comment?
You know, like professors, admin staff, mature students, parents and grandparents, ...
173,000 people have died in the USA this year from Covid 19 and the toll is rising.[1] that’s more than the total number of cases (22,000) in Australia. We got 10% the population of the USA and 0.2% of the deaths.
With all due respect, the USA has the worst Covid 19 rates in the entire fucking world. It is a travesty. You guys can say what you like, but your plan is literally killing people.
And specifically to your point: Do you think kids teach themselves? Kids are part of families, kids are taught by adults, kids catch busses driven by adults, kids meals are cooked by adults. The death rate of kids is irrelevant. Since kids can still spread the disease, they should be isolated like everyone else.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Look a bit further down... Australia 17.2, Vietnam 0.26, Thailand 0.84, New Zealand 4.5. Indonesia, with a comparable population to the USA but far more densely populated - and far poorer - is just 23.9.
The USA, richest country in the world, reserve currency of the world, has the 8th worse death rate in the whole world. That is vile. Meanwhile, your moron in chief is pointing to New Zealand and saying it’s out of control there because they had an “outbreak” of 9 cases. 9!
That’s roughly how many new cases the USA has every 18 seconds.
There is no excuse for what’s happened in the USA.
I'm not sure we can take your comment seriously.
I'd be surprised if that happened. Stanford's in a heavily populated part of California. It might make sense for them, based on the student population (mostly rich or at least well off) and location. My university has plans to keep students in campus housing even if we're forced to go 100% online, and I think from a public health perspective, that's a good thing. You don't want college students moving around if you have an outbreak. And once they're home, they're definitely not going to all just sit in the basement - they'll still be going to bars and parties. That would be a disaster. And the only place that there's hope they'll be tested or interact with others that are tested is on campus.
> My son's state university is forcing students to return in person.
That's horrible. As much as possible, we're accommodating students that feel safer online. About the only way I could see someone being forced to return is if their remaining credits were a lab science class. The worst thing you can possibly do is increase the density on campus. Everyone here is encouraged to work off campus as much as possible. Many of our courses are online or hybrid, where you reserve the in-person interactions for the parts where it delivers real value over the alternative. It's that 20% where face to face matters, not the other 80%.
This has actually begun already at the high school level.
Once again I believe net/net the beer virus will be positive for America in the long run - even if only on the educational level.
Some will insist that a portion of the population will be disenfranchised and that is true.
But our education assumptions and priorities have been wrong for so long now that it has actually become the weakness of an entire generation for the last 10-20 years.
Just think of it! In a few months we are completely re-examining the utility of taking out a student loan that many cannot pay back in their working lifetimes.
We’re looking and complaining if colleges will go online or reopen in person classes - but there is so much more going underneath that conversation.
This is maybe (hopefully) the last generation of the “underwater basket weaving” so-called useless degrees.
The student debt problem is not really related to the college format. The format existed in earlier decades, exists in other countries and exists in K-12 education without runaway costs and student debt.
It's mostly a matter of policy. The US' method to expand third level education to most of the population was by government backed and/or subsidized loans, without price controls. This caused an inflation in credit, prices, and cost. This is reversible, but deflation is always painful.
Meanwhile, I disagree that “underwater basket weaving” degrees are the problem. At least, these tend to be real subjects that students are actually interested in. The real problem is "Online Marketing" degrees, or most business degrees excepting accounting and finance.
These business degrees are fake subjects. The material was invented for the purpose of creating a textbook, course or somesuch. Nothing they teach is useful. Worryingly, these have the greatest intake... because they're easy, and sound relevant to getting a job.
I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.
But, I also think we should try to keep the level of investment (time, money, social capital) in education high. Get efficient by doing more, not doing the same for less.
I don't think that whether real students are interested in a topic is related to how well that choice of study does for them in the real world.
International relations, anthropology, women's studies, psychology, etc., are all real subjects that students are actually interested in. Some small fraction of the people who study them actually go on to do something near-related to those topics. Many (most?) others go on to work recruiters, office managers, in call centers (etc), immediately throwing away their studies and never revisiting them.
"online marketing" degrees are just part of this category, not anything special in themselves.
The trend hopefully is not just in how study happens but what people choose to study, because a lot of time and money is being wasted in things that never get used, because a lot of students have no real interests, and we teach them if they choose and go to college for anything - anything at all - then they'll magically do well. This is a lie and a disservice. We should be pushing people towards STEM and trade schools. Hopefully this situation helps do that.
Most business courses are literally fake. The stuff being taught was invented in order to be taught. Quite a lot of it is learning the meaning of terms that were invented in order to be taught. It's not that there aren't real business subjects. Finance and accounting are real subjects. Economics is a real subject, in the sense that philosophy is a real subject. Statistics, etc.
The trend is (and has been for decades) to teach mostly (or only) fluff courses.
The bottom third of these things are functional equivalents of diploma mills. Ask business graduates over a pint. Most will admit it.
In my experience "International Relations" classes teach very little that's actually valuable. I think there's a common in mistake in thinking at because X is important, then university classes about X are useful. There are a lot of subjects that are important but where the study of it in academia (at least at the undergraduate level, but I suspect higher up as well) isn't handled well at all.
I think the mistake that a lot of people make, however, is thinking that this is merely a humanities vs. STEM issue. There also seems to be a lot (though perhaps not quite as much) useless classes in the STEM fields as well.
Worst of all, I've seen very little interest in academia (both STEM and the humanities) in whether or not their way of teaching is effective - its simply assumed to be, and that's the end of the discussion much of the time. It's claimed that academia fosters critical thinking, but there often seems to be a dearth of critical thinking from those who are within it.
I didn’t find any of it relevant at the time. Fast forward 25 years and now that my IT work is distributed full-remote global operations, it turns out my IR foundation gives me a unique [perspective] and VERY influential position in an Engineering org.
So there is a certain long-term value in cross-training in this way.
Also, many of the things that were covered in IR classes weren't just useless, but more often than not turned out to be entirely detached from reality. For instance, focusing on things like Thomas Huntington vs. Thomas Friedman (neither of who seem to have had a great track record or understanding of the world).
It ended up being a powerful ‘soft’ asset in a transition to engineering management, by virtue of being the staffmember able to identify and resolve problems which originated in cultural and linguistic domains.
One does not need IR training to (say) socially engineer a budget prioritization for sending engineers on overseas exchanges, but I feel it influenced my thinking in this regard.
This forms what I think is the underlying thread here. For those that aren't as flexible and creative in applying their talents and education, most of these classes really do end up being useless, and for them, a waste of money in the long run.
If you're already capable, chances are that no matter your field of study, you're going to land somewhere that you can find a way to use your knowledge; but this really seems to me more a case of interest and driven/natural critical thinking skills than it is a reflection of the content of the classes. Those that apply themselves can find niches to sharpen their skills, whereas those opportunities aren't necessarily sought out by everyone.
So, in effect, while some individuals taking classes of any sort, even poorly taught, might have the fervor to find a path towards enrichment, not all students will have this experience. And this leads to the "basket weaving" degrees for others: subjects that, while not generally irrelevant a priori, are generally irrelevant for many experientially.
There is another aspect which I will add: the ‘softest’ parts of the liberal arts curriculum — International Relations would fit here — was until recently reserved for aristocrats. The children of farmers and factory workers would ostensibly have no use in learning The Great Game. The best players of the game are those who need no employment.
Those of us from anything but the uppermost classes back then would be stumbling into the edges of a world they can dimly perceive, to serve as clerks at best.
Even with decades of professional experience as a diplomat or analyst, your sample size of countries and international situations will be very small. Having both a theoretical understanding of the underlying dynamics, and a broad view of the whole problem space as it has been explored historically, is qualitatively different from the lessons you get on the job.
He was supposedly in his 80s but appeared 60. His ancestors were some kind of lords of the forests; his father was responsible for training Gurkhas, though he himself preferred the company of the muhajadeen as a boy (photos provided).
He displayed gold disks which could buy humans at certain markets, and spoke of tribes which taught him how to travel in Dreamtime. It was literally thrilling stuff, all too fantastic to believe if not for the artifacts....
From the POV of a student entering a job market, anthropology or international studies may be completely useless. But the student gained real knowledge that is useful for some jobs (even if they're not pursuing them). And it can be useful in their life. To use a CS analogy, I never needed calculus or control theory during my $dayjobs, but I use them for myself, to better understand the world and occasionally on hardware hobby projects.
Meanwhile, those fake degrees are literally scams. I.e. students (and their families) are being scammed for their money. The topics are self-referential (invented to be taught), and exist in order to justify spending few years on them, so that the degree rewards putting in work - which makes that degree valuable for employers in the first place. And during the course of that degree, various entities - universities, textbook publishers, etc. - are bleeding students dry. It's not just a degree mill, it's a money printer. The degree becomes purely proof of work, and on top of wasted years of your life, you also have to pay for it.
Please provide examples. I thought Communications was bullshit until I read a textbook. Cyber security is not a bullshit field even though actual practitioners hold degree programmes in it in extremely low esteem. What are some examples of business or other degrees that are in some objective sense valueless? Criminal justice degrees or fire science ones are hazing credentialism but they’re not literally worthless and the research they’re based on is real.
At least humanities courses teach students to write. They're basically essay writing classes.
The one who'd dropped out was clearer and more consistent in their writing than the BA in English. Perhaps math enforces a level of pragmatism that the humanities don't?
Anecdotal, of course, but I've seen this pattern often.
I disagree in that many of the other topics have a real academic history and tradition, involve the expression of genuinely important ideas. Being immersed in that for years has value: in the facts learned, the overall experience, and an appreciation for aspects of the world that you might not have understood or appreciated before.
The fact that that arts degrees often have a very good return on investment /might/ be because they are a waste of time and irrelevant but it seems like the preponderance of evidence indicates that they are not a complete waste of time. https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/collegeroi/
Pushing students towards STEM and trade schools is probably not a good idea, creating markets that actually work properly and then letting the students sort all that out for themselves seems like a better way.
Am I reading the chart correctly? If so, I don't see how your link favors your argument.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/business/liberal-arts-ste...
There isn't a crisis of unemployed liberal arts majors in America or the world, there is a reason for that. Of course there are a lot of people that have convinced themselves that there is such a crisis!
I also agree that it's a problem that a lot of people are going into college just because they don't have any other ideas and it's seen as a respectable thing to do. I think the main cause is that our society doesn't give nearly enough support to people entering the workforce, and is oddly determined for people to move from being a full-time student to a full-time worker, with nothing in between.
Might as well cut the S and M off that because most people who get a science degree probably aren't working in the filednwithout higher education and even the there's so few jobs available. Most people with math education probably aren't working directly in mathematics, but at least you can make the argument that there are other fields where math is related enough to be somewhat useful.
I think while the correlation may be weaker than what some claim, it is still there. To put it another way, I have seen very few cases of students who hated the field, were force-fed it and then would turn it a successful career. And a few that would do that tend to look for opportunities to change course. Being really interested in a subject is a great encouragement to acquire deep knowledge, not just a good grade. And such deep knowledge can bring benefits for the rest of the life.
As an example: I have a PhD in math but "tossed it" and went to work writing software and algorithms. My employers never cared about my PhD. I never used much of the "PhD" math I learned in grad school and I probably forgot most of it. Computing a homology group? Topological entropy? Forget it.
But was the PhD a waste? I do not think so! As a side effect of being in grad school, teaching undergrad classes and arguing with friends doing math and physics I became friends with many fields and learned techniques that still serve me well. So definitely no regrets for me for spending 5 years learning things I did not directly use afterwards.
I do agree with your last point -- we should not be telling students that anything they study will lead them to success after graduation. They should choose a field with some applications. But among the multitude of such fields they should choose one they genuinely like. My 2c.
You are drawing a line that is convenient to your argument.
I have an engineering degree, and worked for a bunch of years in my discipline. As part of the degree, I had to take 3 calculus courses and one differential equations course. Never needed them on the job. I took 2 circuits courses, 3 electronics courses, 2 communications courses, 2 E&M courses, 1 control theory course, and 1 microcontrollers course - all part of my major. About half were mandatory (not electives). Of these, only 2 courses were relevant for my job. I could have done it as effectively as I did without taking all those other courses.
Amongst engineers, my engineering experience is not an outlier. My experience is the norm. Even while I was in college that was the feedback I would get from people in industry: Most of the engineering courses are useless for your job, and getting the degree is merely a formality and not much of an indicator of knowledge/expertise. The whole "a degree shows you can commit to something for a dedicated amount of time" is mostly a post hoc justification.
Your argument that a "small fraction" of people who study them actually go on to use them applies very well to engineering degrees. I suspect they would apply equally well to CS degrees as well. I mean, I'm the perfect example. I took very little CS in school, but make a living as a SW professional.
Most people I know who got math degrees (but not a PhD) use almost none of it in their jobs - even the technical jobs. Ditto for physics. Should we do away with these as well?
In general, look at all the people who have a BS degree in something other than CS and are working in the SW industry. Look at their degrees. While engineers like me often actually do go on to become engineers, for probably all other majors (math, physics, literature, philosophy, etc) you'll find they rarely get a job in their discipline.
I've lived in countries where those subjects are usually not offered in universities. It really sucks. You usually end up with 2 scenarios:
A class full of people who don't care about the subject but are taking it because society has deemed that what they are interested in is not to be taught in universities. This often results in a lowering of the standards to appease them (who are often in the majority). Indeed, many math majors in the US complain about this - calculus, diff eq and linear algebra are usually taught to cater to engineers, and not math majors.
Or you'll get the other extreme, where the standards are made unnecessarily tight to keep those people out, but in effect also then prevent decent students who are interested in the topic from studying it.
Almost all math graduates at my undergrad ended up going into (a) finance as quants, (b) PhD program, (c) data or SWE-related job in tech [me], or (d) some kind of K-12 math educator job.
Probably 30% PhD, 30% SWE/data in tech, 20% quant, 20% K-12 education. The people who did K-12 wanted to do that for much of their life typically, and the people who did PhD either (50%) knew that's exactly what they wanted to or, or really didn't know what they wanted to do.
Perhaps our program doesn't reflect the story on a national level though. Unsure there.
I mean thinking of a typical non specialized business BA here (Germany) the math and statistics classes are pretty useful, as is the basic economics primer. The required law courses and tax related courses are pretty useful. Accounting, finance and controlling are useful as well and so are marketing (mostly math/data analysis), strategy, project management and production management (usually operations research centric but also covers quality management). HR seems fairly meh unless you want to go into HR (as the most relevant stuff is already covered in law).
The typical electives cover more in depth of the above and sometimes business information systems, psychology, programming and the like.
And there's some other stuff that's pretty useful like negotiation classes or case studies (if they cover interesting topics).
As I said, I have one of these degrees, and have hired and worked with many people with such degrees.
First, I agree that the math and (particularly) the statistics classes are useful. Finance and accounting too, in theory, though the vast majority do not seem to internalize much. Business pretty minimal though. A 3-4 years business degree comes with less math education than the first year of an engineering degree, chemistry, physics, etc.
Also.. the majority of business degrees today allow students to avoid most math altogether... and most students do this. The whole thing is continuously moving downmarket. Most business degrees (graduate & undergraduate) are not recognised BAs anymore.
"The market" wants easy degrees with no math. They also don't want accounting or finance. This leaves just the nonsense.
IMO, at this point, most business degrees are less useful than history, philosophy, etc. Graduate salaries are about the same.
Why does it matter if they’re BA or something else? And recognised by who?
And obviously a postgrad business degree is not going to be a BA... because that’s an undergrad degree.
I think if you’re saying a MBA from a reputable school is useless I think you’re being really really silly. I see the opportunities these degrees give you and they are in a most literal sense extremely useful. They also seem academically valuable to me, with fascinating lectures by extremely well qualified people, and visiting amazing institutions.
The only place, where I've seen this super-useless business-degrees actually was a private uni, selling a "marketing" bachelors. Not sure, what the person (acquaintance of my sister) learned there, but apparently it didn't even know a lot about the internet as a marketplace, last time I talked...
Counterpoint: most software developers I've known.
I know people who went to college, but lived at home with their parents "to save money". In reality, they didn't need to save the minimal room and board fees of a state school; they were mostly just cowards. They are the people that haven't changed at all since high school. They're the people that are afraid of everything in the world outside their small circle.
I guess that's fine for them, but I would want more for myself, and for my children.
I did exactly that. Lived at home, attended college, and also worked nearly full time to pay for school. I graduated with nearly no debt, and the the day after graduating college moved out with a good job.
Not sure how that makes someone a coward or afraid to go outside their small circle. Some of the people I went to HS with all went to the same big state school so they could actually stay in the their small circle. Once done, they moved back to where we grew up, are still in the same small circle, and have/had large college debt to go along with it.
I haven't seen anyone from HS in over 15 years, and have lived and traveled all over. I would be cautious to paint people making financially prudent decisions with such a broad brush.
Like the person playing in a local band, telling me "I moved out" - me: "nice, but how can you afford that" - "I work as a tutor" - "that 400€ is not supporting your apartment" - "oh, no, my father is paying for that". yessss.
I would really liked to have moved out too for the aforementioned reasons (lived in a small city next to uni-town, where there's basically nothing happening and except for my small circle, I didn't find HS people very interesting...), but basically all the great experiences cost money and/or time of which there is none, if you really do it in a financially sound way while studying something MINTy... (and I doubt that feeling like a slave is the glorious experience).
Note: probably I was a coward in the beginning for not moving away, because then I could have gotten state-assistance and cheap student dorms... Though that's kind of a though choice, when your uni of choice is basically the academically best around in your country... (and frankly, at this point I didn't have a lot of people telling me, that this not necessarily is, what you want in a bachelors degree...)
I think many of the people who weren’t well off only afforded this experience by taking on debt.
Besides, there’s more ways than just college to have that “real” growth experience. Military, mission work, peace corps. Hell, I’d even argue these are more of an experience because they aren’t built on the somewhat artificial backdrop of universities that can insulate you from the “real” world without all the debt downside
Military has actual big price in people who join it. Veterans do have issues to adjust back to civilian society. Which is basically euphemism for whole host of serious issues. Military families divorce often and their famillies do have actual issues due to frequent moving or partner long term away. Domestic violence rates are high.
The whole growth experience is leaving quite a few people in difficult situations after.
And it rubs me wrong when it is framed as "less insulated the 'real' world. It is as insulated as it gets. Or as "real life" or "real growth" as opposed to "not real life" in quite common experience of either college or job or having familly that functions in more normal way.
It is called sacrifice for a reason.
This is true. It’s not a cakewalk for everybody. But the dichotomy of some of those difficult situations is they can both foster growth and simultaneously stress is an individual. I think some would say that stress/sacrifice is a necessary precursor for that growth. Unfortunately, sometimes the stress exceeds the individuals coping mechanisms.
The book Tribe gives an interesting perspective on military service. The author wrote it after his personal growth (and stress) from creating the documentary Restrepo about the outpost of the same name in Afghanistan.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/02...
And it is not in your individual controll to engage with experiences or not. Being soldier is opposite of making individual choices. You do a lot in groups, group conformity and group cohesion are bug things, you get told what to do.
I don’t know your age or experience, but what you said doesn’t ring true to me. If you’re deployed to a non-combat zone you don’t just get a day off every couple weeks. You have liberty most nights and weekends, at least if you’re not actually stationed on a ship.
It’s no different than college. You can be the person who just holes up and plays video games, or just go out in the same groups without exposing yourself to different ideas, or you can get out of your comfort zone. I’ve known people who made the most of their free time by regularly volunteering in local clinics/emergency rooms, lived outside of base in the city with locals, exposed themselves to local culture etc. There’s more freedom than many think. And this is coming from lower enlisted ranks of one of the branches with a reputation of being more disciplined and strict.
I think that if you have good relationships with parents, do your part in the house chores, the school nearby is actually good, there is absolutely nothing wrong with staying at home. If you cant wait till you leave the family home, then maybe it is not that you are super mature, maybe simply relationships in your family sux. Which is not a badge of honor.
To add, living outside of campus have one big advantage - freaking uninterrupted sleep time.
How dare you place judgement on other people's circumstances. Moving away from your family to immerse yourself in your studies is certainly one way to grow as a person, but far from the only way.
Maybe someone has to take care of a family member and can't realistically do that, even if they wanted to. However, taking classes while also taking care of a family member, is that a coward or someone strong?
Maybe someone already knows the path they want to take in life and they see the cost of room and board as an unnecessary expense they can instead save to buy a condo elsewhere. Is that person a coward for being focused or strong?
Maybe someone needs a familiar support network such as a strong family to thrive academically. Is that person a coward for being self aware or strong?
How many people did you meet your freshman year who you thought in the back of your mind, wow they really should have taken a gap year. All they did was waste money on tuition and room and board while they partied and failed courses. Are all these people strong for making lifelong friendships against their better judgement or cowards?
So many reasons why people chose the path they do, I could keep going on here. I would have thought someone getting a liberal arts education would be open minded to other experiences. It sounds like you judge people who not follow in your footsteps, and for that, how dare you!
this might be true of the people you know, but I hope you don't think it holds in general. at the state school I went to, room and board cost the same amount as the in-state tuition itself. for a lot of families, this is not "minimal". if your parents have a spare room and already cook dinner every night, this almost doubles the cost of your education.
if your parents treat you like an adult (ie, you control your schedule, no curfew, etc.), there's no reason why you can't get the full college experience as a commuter.
I agree that the spending time immersed in the university environment is one of the most important parts of the college experience, but you don't have to get expensively kenneled on campus to do that, just spend time on campus with interesting people and interesting organizations.
I would only suggest most people deal with on-campus housing if it is being primarily paid for by a scholarship or grant they won't have to pay back and/or their circumstances don't offer a good alternative. If you're attending a school where there is an option for family (or whatever) that can provide you with a non-distracting environment and a _short_ commute for cheap, do that for a year. Once you establish a cohort of known-reliable friends with similar needs, rent with them, or pick up a modest apartment. I will say, IMO, renting with unknown quantity randos from a campus-predator slumlord _is_ a worse option to university housing, it includes both sets of disadvantages.
I'm also of the opinion that you have a substantial number of gen-eds you still have to take (not covered by APs, etc.), and they won't be paid for by a scholarship, do a year or so at a community college. It will be cheaper and better than the university service courses - gigantic sections taught from materials outsourced to ed-tech carpetbaggers, supervised by disinterested graduate students with alarming English skills, optimized to extract tuition from kids who statistically won't make it. I say this after years of discovering my students who took their early calculus sequence at community college, embarrassingly, tend to be more mathematically literate than the ones who did it at the university. I'm not yet convinced if that is because the ones that had the maturity to do it that way are predisposed and/or usually a little older, or the quality of the early sequence at [intentionally unnamed university] are really that poor.
I suspect room and board costs what it does compared to tuition simply because putting undergrads in a big lecture just doesn’t cost all that much. In addition, the tuition for resident students gets subsidized, while the room and board generally doesn’t.
My husband and I both worked our way through college. I didn't get the social experience at school. There is nothing like working for your degree to keep you laser focused on the reason why you are going to college.
We were both reasonably paid for working class jobs as he was a machinist and I was an electronic technician. Post graduate was so much better - he in mechanical engineering and I in software engineering.
Most of our socialization came on the job. We were both lucky enough to work for great companies with wonderful people.
I went to a top-tier 4-year university, and did develop several life-long friendships, many of which have led to introductions to other people, which have further increased my social and professional circles. It'd be easy to say if I hadn't gone to college, I wouldn't have that now, and, well, that's actually true... but it's missing the point. I'd still be me, and I'd still have the same drive to meet people and take advantage of opportunities. My life would be different, certainly, but I doubt it'd be less socially fulfilling.
The one exception was they knew about me even though I didn't know about them. Halfway through one of my interviews I realized that I knew the interviewer by reputation.
Such strong words! In many countries, it is totally normal to stay at home with your parents and attend a college in your hometown, especially if it is a big enough city with many colleges.
Exactly. This comment is quite insensitive even if ignoring the tuition costs in America. There are other reasons for living at home with your parents while going to university. I personally had to do this due to severe chronic health problems. I was 100% capable of going to university full time while working part time. I just needed to be able to live at home.
In reality, required room and board (usually for freshmen) is merely a way for colleges to make money. The whole "experience" angle is a pretext, but not the real reason. I'm glad my undergrad did not require it.[1] I don't doubt some people benefit from it, but I'm sure most don't. Anecdotally, those who stayed in dorms were more likely to party a lot more and be less focused on studies - lots of distractions. I personally knew quite a few who eventually moved off campus for the sole purpose of eliminating those distractions because their grades were dropping.
[1] I did not stay with family, I paid rent in an apartment. Definitely cheaper. The amusing thing is we folks who had our own apartment generally perceived those who stayed on campus as being less mature. They had meal plans, etc, whereas we were responsible for cooking, etc. I forget what else those who lived on campus had spoon fed to them, but it went beyond just meals.
Small state schools are closer to that, but any of the bigger schools seem to think that because students get easy access to excessive amounts of cheap loans, they can be extravagant in budgeting- sports facilities, gyms, administration, etc.
I guess you could say the same for a publicly-funded system, but at least there the funding is limited and controlled. A lot of people sadly won't blink twice at taking out a larger college loan, even if it'll saddle them with crippling debt later on.
1. Anecdotal evidence that you know a few people that didn't grow up for whatever reason does not mean everyone is like that.
2. In most asian culture, people live with their parents for the entirety of life. Somehow according to you more than half the world's population is cowards. I digress because we're talking about american colleges and living in America but it still baffles me that someone educated like you would think there is nothing wrong with a stupid argument using selection bias.
As a non Asian (with an admittedly fictional Asian pseudonym) I happen to be a member of a Facebook group called Subtle Asian Traits. It’s an extremely popular group, largely made up of young high school to late-20s Asian-Americans (and expats living in other western countries). The most common and persistent theme is the tension between westernized Asian kids and their traditional parents. These kids are desperate to get away from this controlling influence. They find temporary relief and camaraderie by joking about how extremely strict their parents are.
I dunno honestly. Maybe it is different elsewhere, but the college was the most uniform place I have been at. I am not complaining, I liked the experience and did fit in. But it was not diversity in literally any sense of the word.
While the other was a generic and bland sadness that suck the life out of the room and "binge drinking" is the closest form to a local culture and even things which should be a source of culture like the arts are just another box to be checked on somebody's list for posturing's sake.
Was it religious school which went secular in practice or offically? I know some who suspect that the number one reason for that blandness is former religious school that lost the fundamentalist character which drove out the heterodox and was then left with a despeciated monocultural void.
I think for better or for worse what actually drives the selection of people determines the resulting culture and diversity.
But pretty much everyone around you was, well, college student of roughly same age. And plus everyone was focused on math, computer science or something similar. The university itself had other fields of study, obviously, but they had own building so practically you rarely really interacted with each other.
The city it was in obviously had sports clubs, entertainment and whatnot where you could meet non-college students or people of different age or people who study something different. You was not forced to close yourself into some kind university bubble.
But university itself necessary collects similar people at one place. Because everyone there has to be college student and has similar choice of study.
I don't know when the last time you've lived in dorms was, but they're glorified summer camps for adolescents. Having meal plans and an RA aren't exactly badges of courage.
If you don't come from means or have parents that will help pay for you to move out, then taking on living expenses to study is not exactly a good financial choice.
Personally, I wouldn't change it for the world. Student loans covered the expenses (which as you only pay as a small percentage of your wage above a certain amount and are written off after 30 years if you haven't paid them aren't worth worry about too much), and it had both academic and social benefits. Supervisions often started after 18:00 and occasionally ran on til 23:00, and you could have lectures at 9:00 the next morning, which would be a pain with a commute, and you had easier access to resources (libraries, computing facilities).
I threw myself into the social side, having been fairly reclusive during secondary school - I felt much more comfortable doing so living on site, and I got involved in extra curricular activities I wouldn't have done if I had a commute. I had close friends studying law, natural sciences, economics, engineering, medicine, English, anthropology, and music (I studied computer science), and developed a better understanding of and appreciation for these subjects as a result (I remember discussing Roman law somehow becoming a bizarrely frequent subject in first year). I'm still in almost daily contact with the friendship group I formed there, even ten years on. I did a Master's afterwards, and lived at home, and I never felt as connected to either my studies or my peer group.
Still, I certainly wouldn't call anyone who doesn't do that a coward, and think you could get a similar or better experience living off campus at home. It just turned out to be the right step for me[1] - it pushed me enough out of my comfort zone to grow without leaving me feeling lost - and gave me a much better university experience as a result.
[1] And it was effectively required by my university - you have to live within three miles of the city centre, required permission to live outside of college, and you weren't allowed to keep a car within ten miles of the city centre without permission (https://www.proctors.cam.ac.uk/motor-control)
Your experience is true for some and false for others. That's the nature of anecdotes. I moved off campus to save a couple bucks and be "independent" and "spartan" but I missed out on a lot of stuff. I could have been closer to extracurriculars, I could have joined a frat. I get that not everyone has the resources for this stuff, but many do, and we're missing out on something if they can't experience it.
This is part of the reason why I think the level of investment needs to remain high. College performs a complex task. It can't just be replaced by coursera.
I do think that in-person lectures, course design and such need a total overhaul. Modern technology does change the equation. In-person lectures no longer make sense, for example. That doesn't mean in-person college doesn't make sense.
In theory, you could take your college costs and spend them more wisely elsewhere. Internet age gurus like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin & others have been advocating this for 20 years.
Want to learn business? Take $50k out of the $200k price tag of a fancy college and start a business with a few similarly minded people. Pay a seasoned business person to advise you. After 4 years, you will know much more about business. Same for software engineering, etc. Same for side-effects like networking horizon expansion and everything.
In practice, all that money (whether parental savings to student loans) is tied up with college. The social capital which allows anyone to spend 4 years on abstract "betterment" is tied to college. The safety nets keeping you on course to graduate aren't there.
It's theoretically possible, easy even. In practice, this level of determined heterodoxy is a 1-in-a-thousand thing. Very unlikely to be chosen and very unlikely to bee seen through by a 20-year old.
People operate within structure. We are orders of magnitude less independent than we imagine.
(Also I think the parent meant that the 20-year-old would take $50k from their parents, not $200k. But agree that $50k is likely out of reach for most people in that situation as well.)
Life works this way because life works this way. Social structures exist to reinforce the status quo, and these are only changed incrementally, over a long period of time. Potential college-goers who want to jump the queue and do something radical right now, even if it's a much better thing, are going to have a hard time unless they have well-off parents who are willing to take a shot on them.
If you think about yourself at 18... how likely would you have been to seek out social clubs, conferences, or hobby groups on your own?
I think that would be a great strategy! Spending the money on hobby groups, conferences etc could be put on a resume!
Now thinking of all kinds of options that would give better experience...it seems driving to these might be the bottleneck. But surely there are ones that can subject a student to different opinion/people etc without needing to commute. Heck even a good internship could replace dorm life, and would actually PAY the student.
This is also a description of summer camp.
I went to college late dropped out and then went to college again even later in life.
There are many more job opportunities available to me now. But funny you talk about business degrees I found out I lost a job I was qualified for to a person with a business degree. It was just Helpdesk but the business degree person had no IT experience. It was at a large well-known financial organization.
>I do agree the college format should change completely, go online, etc. I think efficiency should be a part of that.
When I went back to college many of the students younger than me had nothing but contempt for classroom style learning. Some of those people failed within the first semester or early second semester. There's also a strong belief anything can be learned by Googling it. I learned about Course Hero when my lab partner submitted a paper we worked on, I was almost expelled. Knowing something takes effort even if you are handed the answers. You can't shortcut learning because knowledge isn't given it's earned.
That's right. It's like using a lever to lift that barbell isn't going to make you stronger. Training your brain requires effort, just like training your muscles.
I somewhat agree. Sadly, I find that of the degrees offered online, they mostly seem to be either the "underwater basket weaving" degrees or the "online marketing" degrees.
In what OECD countries do students go into crippling debt for their tertiary education? There are only two that I know of, one of which being the USA.
I don't think that the data doesn't really support your conclusion.
I would define "success" or "usefulness" on the basis of something measurable, such as average starting salaries for a given major.
Even if business degrees are "fake" subjects, I believe they have higher average outcomes/starting salaries than most humanities majors.
Seeing as outcome and job opportunities are the real thing that the customers (students) care about, it makes the most sense to look at the actual outcomes, using a measurable metric.
(I'm also interested in improving science)
The incentives (mostly via credit, but also social incentive) for regular college is already super-high... as is the incentive of colleges that receive this credit as payment.
You would need to overcome that with even bigger incentives... creating the same inflation problem, but now for trade schools. If you don't, trade schools have to compete with colleges funded by the ever increasing student loan complex.
Imagine a country that has a suburban housing policy similar to the college education policy. Contractors get subsidies, donations, grants. Buyers have access to easy, no money down, no question mortgages backed by a government. Prices inflate. Houses get bigger. A massive debt pool keeps growing.
You say: "this is really inefficient. Don't some of you want downtown apartments instead?" This isn't going to work while competing with the other housing system... no matter how reasonable the plan is. Throw in a stigma about apartment-dwellers... your plan is now doomed.
Unless students are paying out of pocket (student loan schemes don't count), then you need price controls.
Yea no more pesky English majors and philosophy students who bring up all sorts of annoying questions about the power structures that create our society. Can't we just stop thinking about stuff and get back to work!
I'm also hoping that CS will be transformed into something more useful, thinking about complexity theory is a waste of time (outside of helping us make good white boarding questions). We really need an army of CRUD engineers to do useful stuff. If you're learning about something that doesn't make someone else money, you're wasting everyone's time.
Thank god ML has learned to focus from the start on making things that make money. Only handful of whiny researchers complain about annoying things like "oooh we don't really understand how this works, we should understand foundations, blah blah".
But statisticians, oh boy, those academic nerds are the opposite of those ML folks. Always complaining that we aren't running A/B tests correct, and not accounting for confounding variables. All we need to know about stats is how to put results for a marketing experiment into a calculator and then tell the marketing director that the variant they like better is the winner. You can learn that in two weeks.
Brave new world with such people in it!
(bonus points to anyone who recognizes the work of Shakespeare both this post and parent reference).
Now imagine you remove that knowledge from the adults of your country. You remove that knowledge from heads of industry, community leaders, and voters. What kind of society are you left with? College needs to be expanded to all with an emphasis on the liberal arts, a high school education just isn’t good enough to produce a good society.
Until plumbers, electricians, carpenters, etc. stop being a part of the undesirable Other to middle and upper middle class Americans, nothing will change. Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades. It is a problem of culture, not economics.
Source? I think most people view these jobs as the foundation of the American middle class. At least we do in the Midwest, where I grew up.
==Paying $100,000 for your kid to study underwater basket weaving at Harvard is still socially superior to running a multi-million dollar business in the trades.==
Having a Harvard degree gives you higher earning potential than a career in the trades [1].
==It is a problem of culture, not economics.==
Oddly, all the jobs you mention are historically union jobs. Meanwhile, one side of the political aisle has attempted to weaken unions over the past 4 decades. If we want people to embrace union jobs, maybe we should embrace unions?
[1] https://www.scholarshipcare.com/average-income-of-harvard-un...
That kid who went to college at 18 has a lot more options. They can switch majors, they can take internships, they can get their degree in underwater basketweaving and still be considered a good applicant to a masters program. They can also take that degree and apply to a lot of 'soft' positions. A basketweaving degree won't get you a dev job at google, but it might get you a HR job.
This is not unlike the required courses that predominate pre-major studies at a traditional university (in the U.S., at least)
If my kid wants to become an electrician I'd probably say "Why not major in EE?". A construction worker - why not major in Civil Engineering? If I felt my kid was fundamentally incapable of the level of effort required for those degrees, perhaps my opinion would change.
I'm on HN and I have an engineering degree, so I'm predisposed to think my kid could get one too. I'm not sure how I'd feel otherwise.
Once you need a career it doesn't really work like that though, often you're working years as an apprentice in a specified trade before you can even think about branching out on your own.
If you switch trades you're back at the bottom with apprenticeships all over again.
Someone like an English major can much easily change careers as long as they're somewhat adjacent (e.g., copywriting, research, journalism, etc) and generally starts off at a higher salary depending on their degree level. Until you hit masters level most degrees are broad generalized education.
Trades are specializations. If you're unsure about which trade you want to get into, you'd likely be better served with a business degree (which is another generalized area of study)... at least that can be applied across trades. Many tradespeople struggle with the business side of things despite being very practiced at their trade.
You can start college at 20 as easily as at 18. The problem is that you get nothing for the two years (except, I suppose, you can work as an electrician to pay for college, instead of working at McDonalds).
I also don't know how easy it is to get into the same college at 20 that one would have gotten into at 18. If at 18 they got accepted to a school that cost 100K/year (as the parent comment suggests) then they may find that school closed to them 2 years later.
There are art degrees, for artists, not people expecting to make well paying careers out of it.
I know my limits of what I can do. I can sew my own buttons, do a shitty hem on something that doesn't matter. Repairing the plumbing on a bathroom sink I did catastrophic damage too is towards my upper limit; I was able to source replacement material and do the labor myself, but I consider myself fortunate that I was able to do that with only a week without a bathroom sink. Also, don't tell my landlord but now I do have a plumber's wrench on hand.
So I go to the experts. The tailor, the seamstress, the plumber. "This broke, I messed up, you can fix it better, yes next Thursday after 4pm sounds fantastic."
Yes, I understand the pride in doing things yourself. I also see no shame in shooting up a flair.
My brother is 4 years younger than me, dropped out of high school, and makes a TON of money mowing lawns and doing pools and HVAC work in Florida.
That lifestyle ages you fast though. I have plenty of energy to be physically active after work and have no aches/pains to speak of. I wouldn't give that up for the money he makes. And that physical divide is only going to get bigger as we age.
But the trades also include indoor trades such as medical technicians and assistants.
My father didn’t want me to follow grandpa and be farmer or carpenter because it was a hard life. Most hvac, plumber, electricians I’ve known were following in family footsteps because it was lucrative and they were raised in it. It’s non-trivial to break into, physically demanding and years of apprenticing before you can go your own way.
It can be done, and there are great opps for those who can stick with it for 5 years. And like all trades, your market is growing because all the old guys are getting old.
http://sfelectricaltraining.org/
Of all the kids who could go to college or go to tradeschool they all chose college.
If you want to be happy and healthy in America, you must have a way to make money. (Or your parents must give you so much money that you're set for life.)
Remember, success is way more than half luck. Going to Harvard makes your luck much better.
That Harvard Rolodex will get you a job even if your degree barely certifies that you have a pulse.
Hmm. I guess maybe there would be cases like "the school requires you to take at least N courses, and you don't want that much workload (or, more charitably, some of your courses are extremely demanding and you want to lighten the load on the rest), so you take some facile courses". Or cases like Feynman taking astronomy and philosophy to satisfy the humanities requirement. But I don't think there's any case where you'd need to major in underwater basketweaving... unless that is the easiest major and that's your criterion. I dunno, if they want an easy major, can it at least be something useful? Perhaps it's good in some sense if the genuinely useful majors are strictly separated from the easy ones? Hmm.
I think "Communications" seems to have that reputation, and a subject by that name does sound useful for being in a company (I have no idea what is actually taught in it). My brother-in-law said he majored in Communications because it had the lightest courseload, so he could work for Microsoft while attending school.
The parents probably recognize that, if their kid fails miserably at Harvard but manages to graduate with a questionably useful degree, they will still succeed because they'll still be able to flex their network to get a job of some kind with a salary.
Once you have a salaried position your life has a step jump in stability.
Human society, and the economy are not rational. Assuming that they are is foolish.
The idea that "social desirability" does not reflect actually valuable stuff is foolish. Class exists in some form in every society. People are always hyper-aware of class issues, and it has always been a primary part of the college/career decision process.
In the UK, class is still discernible immediately by accent, schools are mostly segregated by class, etc. In Ireland, it's not like the UK... though some Dublin neighborhoods still have very distinct class accents. Even this is dying off. But.. class still exists in a more amorphous form broadly.
I have seen an apparent consensus that the upper class schools and such focus only on prestiege and signaling and then when they are placed in management by other from the background make a complete hash of it while thinking promoting someone who actually knows what they are doing would be an unthinkable faux pau because they might wear brown shoes in London or worse not coordinate their belt and shoes! It doesn't even seem to be a matter of capital given the fact there are apparently plenty of impoverished "patricians" and working class wealth to invest in and they were marrying into money from outside their silly class frameworks for generations.
It seems to be utterly useless on every level yet society still persists for some daft reason. Why not do away with it? Not in the "Get the gulitiones, senseless violence, and the full circle revolution started!" way but "A ignore the useless twits to stew in their own resulting irrelevance." way.
We even take the next step of referring those who point out racism as the actual racists.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin...
It's also not the case that a college education and massive debt go hand-in-hand. In most other Western countries college is either free or much less expensive.
Finally, I disagree that we should determine how "useful" a degree is based solely on its ability to help someone find a high-paying job. While it's certainly true that it's harder to find a job studying the humanities than STEM, perhaps we should consider why it is that our society places such a low value on these subjects?
Why? Class. Having a degree and having been to university is such a pre-requisite to being middle class here, far more so than money.
It is also a common problem that certain influential jobs preferentially recruit from certain schools; so people apply to Stanford as a prerequisite for Google just as they apply to École Nationale d'Administration if they want to be part of the French government.
Yes! People take "simple jobs" like hauling trash or cleaning sewers or welding pipes because it's stress free! Unlike those high-stress jobs at Facebook where you take the free party bus to the office, get free food, drink, gym, yoga, and massages, and even have internal message boards where you're encouraged to post about how horrible you're being treated. So stressful! I bet all of those 10xers at the FAANGS wish they could be maintenance workers.
For every person working at a FAANG you can probably find 1,000 working in a place with the same shitty working conditions most people are subjected to.
As a counter example cops can make $200k a year doing detail work (standing around) and retire with a pension after 20 years. There are similar situations (with lesser pay) for a lot of city and state level civil service.
There are shit jobs that will wear you down in every field. They're the jobs most people are working.
"How many trade workers are even capable of going to Stanford?"
People like to talk about "grit" in white collar circles. If you want to see real "grit" go talk to the blue collar people who do shitty jobs at the expense of their personal health so their kids can have a better life.
The working class has an understanding of self sacrifice that is largely absent from more well-off groups.
The non-trade courses of study aren’t particularly popular with college students anymore. I don’t know many people with degrees in english or latin or history or philosophy. And the few that I do always planned to go to trade school (law school) so their undergrad course of study didn’t much matter.
Well good luck communicating with other people because is not how anyone else anywhere uses the word ‘trade’.
They’re not ‘trades’ they’re ‘professions’.
And I would guess you already know this and you’re trying to be contrary rather than you’re genuinely misunderstanding a basic word.
The software industry would benefit from moving in the direction of being either a "trade" without the manual labor, or toward being a real profession, but it currently occupies a weird middle ground.
Those are all things that are near-universally features of working a trade, so what exactly is the difference between a trade and a profession?
So I guess software development is just basically like bagging groceries. Totally informal.
I wouldn't believe the stories on candidates failing FizzBuzz until I saw it with my own eyes, several times!
I don’t think I’ve used the word outside of its definition:
> 3. b : the business or work in which one engages regularly : OCCUPATION
> 3. c : the persons engaged in an occupation, business, or industry
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trade
Have you never heard people make a distinction between tradespeople and professionals?
What do you think the words in this article mean? Are they completely new concepts to you?
https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/business-income-man...
> A ‘profession’ historically meant the three learned professions of the Church, Medicine and the Law but today the term goes much wider and normally involves some substantial exercise of intellectual skill.
What is the distinction between a chef trained at a vocational school and a lawyer trained at a law school? Or a programmer trained at Stanford?
Chefs produce something tangible, you might say. Lawyers do, too. We draft briefs and contracts and court filings. Or maybe you’ll point out that a chef has learned a skill that takes a certain je ne sais quoi that cant be taught but can only be acquired with deliberate practice? I would say the same of programmers. (And attorneys, for that matter.) Coding is as much an art as it is a science.
And I don’t think the document you’ve linked excludes professional trades. Lawyers and doctors and programmers all provide a service:
> ‘Trade’ therefore takes its ordinary meaning, which normally involves commercial operations by a trader who provides goods or services to his or her customers in exchange for a reward.
One is considered by society to be a 'tradesperson', while the other is considered a 'professional'. Society considers law to not be a 'trade' because it is a 'profession' instead and society sees these as mutually exclusive by definition.
I think what you really mean is you don't agree with society's definitions. That's fine - it's an interesting discussion and I didn't express any opinion on it myself. But I don't think you were ever really mistaken about what the original comment meant - you were feigning confusion as a rhetorical device, which is why I think other people down-voted you.
Without that, a meeting of a profession is commonly called a conference.
You’re right there is a legitimate distinction, but maybe we should stop. It is 2020 and thinking you’re “better” than other people for relatively arbitrary reasons is passé.
The common factor turns out to be accountability. If the childminder falsely certifies an application, Ofsted will revoke her registration for dishonesty. A military officer will be cashiered. A teacher sacked and added to the barring list. So even those posts which are not 'professional' have enough consequences for acting falsely that the state relies on them to be honest.
I never seen anyone talk about medicine as a trade nor mean doctor when they said trade.
Yes, there are people today that wind up with college debt and don't have a correspondingly higher income to pay it off. But there are other solutions to address this problem, like lowering the costs of college to where they were just a couple of decades ago. Or perhaps changing the framework by which loans are made (e.g. if college loans were simply dismissible in bankruptcy, default rates would skyrocket and lenders would not be able to hand out such large sums of money so easily, and colleges would have to adapt by lowering their costs). And on average, people with degrees still earn more than those without, and enough more to pay off a loan over time. We should be wary of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
In a world where college is no longer normalized as the default option for a moderately ambitious 18-year-old, aren't we just reverting to how things worked for hundreds of years until quite recently? The kids from upper class families will continue to go to Ivy League schools, but kids from middle class and poorer families will be told from a young age that their path is to go to a trade school, or get an apprenticeship. College is too expensive and not worth it for them, so they won't even try. It just seems like a step backwards.
Lastly, I will admit I'm somewhat personally invested in this topic, and I take some offense at the idea of useless degrees. My partner grew up lower-middle class, neither of their parents went to college, but they took out a lot of money in loans and got an English Literature degree (which I believe is a commonly-agreed useless degree). If it had not been for the encouragement of teachers, and basically society at large that college is a good idea, they could have very easily not gone and just gotten an entry level job in their home town instead. Now they have a great, high-paying career in tech working in sales and operations. One very successful founder I worked for in the past had a philosophy degree (as did many other famous people in tech, like Reid Hoffman). Every job, but especially a job in sales or management/leadership, requires working with, understanding, and motivating other people. Many liberal arts degrees focus on exactly this.
Dismissing any degree outside of science, technology, or medicine as being as useless as "underwater basket weaving" is just absurd.
Many? Only ~10% of student loans are in delinquency. 90% of borrowers are making payments.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/topics/student-deb...
In my personal contact graph - every engineer I know who has graduated (even with C grades) has obtained a job and is happy with what they're doing. If they have loans, I am sure they're paying them off.
Only people I see having kids are those with strong, secure incomes, or those with no prospects at all. The cohort in the middle earning $40k to $120k doesn’t feel secure enough, or at least not until their 30s.
I'm not really understanding students who take on loans they cannot realistically pay back. Finding the salary and job prospects for various majors is a literally trivial google search away. How can one go through 4 years of college and never check this?
Actually this has been true for many decades, not just the last 10-20 years. The issue is exasperated due to massive unemployment because of the mismanagement of covid19.
There will be no 're-examining' because there is so much bloat that votes. Countless administrators that actually vote for their interests, at the expense of the students. It's systemic and just like police reform, it's not going to be an easy and fast change. When renovating the system, there are losers and those losers will fight you tooth and nail to prevent progress.
It's partly why I like creative models like Lambda School. There is a massive opportunities for business(es) to help fix this gap but...again, incentives are not static.
A business helping you get a high skilled job, might want cheaper labor, so they flood the market with more workers, which reduces the collective in that field.
In conclusion, these issues are massive/systemic. It's entrenched to society and protected by stakeholders. Effectively making change happen won't be easy and we may be creating a 'wake-a-mole' type environment where we solve today's problems and gain two problems tomorrow.
IMHO since removing the gold standard (1970s), this problem came up. I'm glad you have been able to but that possibility was shrinking every year. Less and less people were able to do what you did, starting in the 70s. Financial college administrators kept up with inflation whereas jobs didn't. Income didn't. Expenses took a little time to catch up with inflation as well. So, that might've been why for your situation. It wasn't extremely prohibitive but the issue compounds every year.
So, given the rising costs of Health Care and College both situations are good examples of this. The rising 'costs' are more people in administration. This could be blamed on regulation among other issues (greed).
As for voting in their self interests, I live in California now. University of California is the #1 employer in this State. This doesn't happen by chance. It happens due to stakeholders. Many people in this States want an 'easy' and 'stable' job. The easiest way to do this is require more red tape (regulation/'initiatives'/etc), in the name of 'progress' and then now you just created a 'stable and easy' job to make sure certain quotas are reach.
Professors and students lose out due to admin workers are more aggressive on making the government enrich their interests.
It’s a total game changer. It blows my mind how people can graduate with a degree and have no guarantee of any work experience. No idea how you turn that into a career.
It's not like it's hard for CS students to get internships in the summer...
And as you said, a significant part of the begining of the year simply covers what was done the previous year. I'd prefer they simply provided a summer curriculum of 2 or 3 hours a week of such work if review is necessary, which would also eliminate the complete discontinuity from one scho year to the next. I'm fortunate that We can do so on our own, piecing together that sort of thing, but plenty of working parents have neither the time, or ability, or inclination to compose their own mini summer curriculum.7
Jobs come from where the booms are. Unless there's an HVAC boom, why would you anticipate a surge in HVAC workers?
Not a criticism/denial of your larger point, just an observation about that point specifically.
This is the unfortunate part to me. I see a large amount of "not minimum wage, but not that great either" jobs require bachelors that the average person could probably do with a HS education, or jobs wanting advanced professional degrees that are paying pennies and probably don't require much more skills than from a bachelors or even associates programs.
And then there's a number of fields where highly skilled (and proven) individuals can't get the better job because they don't have the right degree.
The problem with "part of the population being disenfranchised" is that it includes the some of the parts/minorities that we officially care about (unlike, say, poor white boys in areas that vote for The Other Party).
If a solution can be found where these minorities can instead go and learn something actually useful, I'm all for burning the current university system to the ground.
I think it astounding how we humans are swayed in the information/meme/idea wind.
I'm a parent with children that are five, seven and nine.
I don't think this at all. Basically what happens is that I'm able to afford to pay tutors and nannies and therapists to help with schooling during the day, but most parents are not. This means my kids have a massive advantage that may never be caught up.
Things would be much worse if my children were in their final two years of high school, where college applications are going to be based on "performance" which basically means "did my parents have enough money to continue giving me a decent education when the state failed to do so".
At the same time, I'm also aware of what is happening from the other side of things. One of my children has fairly severe autism and is supposed to have a full-time para-educator assigned to them to help him cope with school. I say "supposed" because it's not happened yet (since late February/ early March) and looks very unlikely to happen for the school year coming in September, no matter how many people I harrass. I also want to add that they have an IEP that is legally binding, and failing to provide services is literally illegal, yet nothing has been done to help with this.
In my case, I (again, insane privilege levels here) can cause enough problems with lawyers and talking to school board members directly that my own son will hopefully be okay but I really worry about any child that has special needs right now and is being ignored or underserved because no one seems to make them a priority.
It's honestly heartbreaking. My son still sets his alarm clock every single day to get up for a school that doesn't exist. He doesn't understand why all of his teachers just stopped teaching him one day and he asks all the time when he will be able to go back.
Just imagine a seven year old autistic kid setting his own alarm and trying to make tomorrow be like the days he remembers. He doesn't understand that things have changed. He completely lost not just his teacher and support staff, but his private therapists and everyone else that he relied upon and that spent years convincing him they would be there to help him and that he should trust them.
The district expects him to be on a computer watching live instruction for 5.5 hours every day. He is seven. He can't manage twenty minutes. He needs someone full-time every day to help him stay on track and yet nothing has been provided and I strongly doubt anything will.
Again, I have backup plans involving hiring someone full-time to teach him. We are insanely, ridiculously lucky to be able to do this. My concern is for all of the other kids who don't have parents that can spend tens of thousands of dollars on teachers and lawyers to fight for their own children. It's so, so wrong that these children, the most vulnerable of all, are being so neglected by the system.
Fuck. That was a rant. My inclination is to delete everything I said here but I think it's important. This virus (and more importantly, the utterly inept, almost criminal lack of response and leadership) is causing enormous, potentially-permanent damage to many, many students, and the only kids that are going to improve are those with parents with plenty of money to shield them.
Although, that was during a time when that 1 year wasn’t just full of netflix (hopefully this is only very rare, and that most parents aren’t just having the young watch TV all day).
Ever noticed how the most agenda-aligned comments are always at the top? HN has become the most disgusting indoctrination platform in the whole IT, and the day will come when it'll burn up in colourful flames.
A sea of change, my ass! Better be prepared for the ocean of backlash for all the crap you're being peddling.
I really hope we can make this work because, as an electrical engineer, most of my classes can't be moved online.
Also it's not just bars or parties. You also have to worry about other gatherings. If people don't where masks and social distance those can become a problem as well. However, so far people have been mostly responsible with other on campus gatherings.
College students can easily spread it to vulnerable populations.
1. Some live at home.
2. Some will go shopping. Some in places without mask mandates.
3. Older professors and staff (custodial, food services, advisors) will be pressured to work (you probably can't just say "I'm not teaching" without quitting).
4. Some may need to use public transit to get to the school. Again also in some places without mask mandates.
5. And of course, some students are vulnerable. Many schools are not allowing remote work when they open.
Add in dorms being super spreader environments and you've got disasters waiting to happen.
The USA is over 5M confirmed cases now. The CDC estimates that the true infection count is 6x-24x that. So on the order of 30M - 120M Americans have already had it now.
The distribution is uneven. Places that hadn't gotten hit are getting hit now. But on average we are likely close to herd immunity.
This is no longer an exponential thing here. We can't have an OOM more cases. It's mathematically impossible. The worst is over (again, on average). I don't think we explicitly tried to follow a herd immunity strategy but that is what ended up happening.
1. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
it makes no sense to limit everyone else
here is where personal responsibility comes into play. If you are concerned stay home. The university and laws should support you.
But the solution is not to punish everyone else, that won't work long term. The sooner people realize that the better. Limiting and collectively taking away people's rights will cause far more trouble long term.
No, it's not being personally responsible. It's collective responsibility.
Personal responsibility in a pandemic is fallacy and idiocy.
Oddly enough I went to ND for grad school, though it was many years ago. The campus was isolated from the surrounding town, but not completely isolated.
If you plot and fit the curve to such an exponential, today you should have ~15 cases. Tomorrow ~25 cases. In one week's time, ~380 cases. ND has ~8600 people attending. To get that many cases should be 14 days from today [0], so August 28th.
If these trends continue as is, then ND won't make it to September before closing down.
Still, the data is sparse.
[0] Day 20 is ~6000 cases, day 21 is ~9400 cases, you can round however you'd like.
The bars should be closed, too.
We should be spending the entire defense budget on paying for people to stay home, stay safe, and to get them what they need; as well as funding as much scientific research as feasible to fight this clear and present danger to our lives and livelihoods.
As we saw in Italy and New York, COVID-19 has the potential to overwhelm hospitals. Officially, almost 170,000 Americans have died. NYTimes estimates that COVID-19 already caused over 200,000 deaths by comparing against the expected number of deaths if we weren't in a pandemic. So yes, COVID-19 is a clear and present danger to our lives.
That is not a lot of deaths. There are over 600,000 deaths from heart disease every year.
Source? I didn’t think it was nearly that high.
This doesn't look like a "99.9% asymptomatic" virus:
https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...
And that's one of the MOST conservative media outlets in the world.
That is far from true.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/financial-times-media-b...
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/financial-times/
Now you don’t even get that. You get some bullshit online instruction that is little more than a glorified MOOC, and when you finally graduate, you have to compete for remote jobs with people from all across the country, and get outbid by people with the same skills as you but willing to work for peanuts because the cost of living in their area is practically negligible.
Meanwhile, you have to keep paying for that massive student loan for most of your life with cash flow that comes in well below your expectations, wrecking your ability to save money and making retirement a distant fantasy that is about as probable as the dreams people have of becoming multi-millionaires.
This should be an outrage, but no one will care. This will be the generation that takes it on the chin.
More like:
underbid by people whose skills are indistinguishable from yours.
This is the same problem we've always had with remote work. As was explained to me, your salary is paid by someone who can't decide what your value is. If you don't know what something is worth, or in fact for, you might as well get the cheap one.
IMO, all teaching as we know/knew it is gone. And those controlling the governance will be happy about that as it removes unnecessary costs.
An infected person comes into contact with other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus. Those people, in turn come into contact still other people to a sufficient degree to transmit the virus to them, etc.
At a school, groups of students form, both officially (e.g., in classes) and unofficially (socially), often in ways that are friendly for transmitting the virus. Then groups reform (students go to their next class, or meet with another group of friends or attend another activity), then reform again... and again... and again, etc.
Of course, this doesn't entirely go away when students are off campus. But the transmission vectors are so much smaller -- classes and groups for. other organizations don't occur; social groups tend to be smaller, more stable and with less overlap into other groups.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/07/06/princeton-announce...
I wonder what the difference is...
[0]: https://abc11.com/coronavirus-classes-nc-state-college/63640...
That said, this is obviously a cash grab, and they're ignoring that students aren't going to follow their rules when they're off campus (Hillsborough St, parties, as you said above.)
I've already seen it happening... this isn't going to go well.
This is once in a decade opportunity to increase the throughput, _and_ increase the quality of their creme de la creme (because with more throughput more high performing outliers will randomly be caught). And they'll 100% squander it.
I was under the impression that the reason more STEM degrees weren't online because you can't effectively replicate science or engineering labs at home very well. Most engineers (not software engineers) I've talked too said they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously.
> they wouldn't take an online degree very seriously
They would, if that was the only degree available. And I'm sure Stanford, of all places, can do it as well as anybody.
True, you can't. But I have a BS degree in physics, and I took a grand total of one physics lab in four years. (I also took one in chemistry.) True, that's not engineering. But then, most math people don't take many labs at all.
So maybe this is true of the "TE" parts of STEM, and not so true of the "SM" parts.
Keeping your kid in town is just infantilizing them. And god knows we have enough enfants terribles in the world, and especially in tech.
She's going to end up with a 28 year old son still living at home playing video games all day, while his degree rots away, wondering what went wrong. Maybe I should start logging dates and conversations. "Here it is, July 15th, 2019..."
not everyone needs to, or can, move across the country for school living in their own place right out of high school
And if we're going to talk about out of touch, I'm not sure where you're from where you think everyone who goes to school has a university in the same town as them, let alone with the degree program they want to attend. Changing your degree to one that's 'good enough' so you can stay in town? That's setting yourself up for a lifetime of disappointment.
As far as I've heard, parking on campus at my alma mater is even worse than when I attended, so being 10 minutes off campus is more conceptual than factual. It's probably true that Uber is far cheaper than a dorm, even if you averaged 3 rides a day, especially these days, but there are loads of semi-spontaneous interactions that become stilted when you have to worry about getting back and forth across town. It's not doing your own laundry, it's the people you meet while doing your laundry.
This is exactly what I did.
I went to a good school and was in a great program for getting my Software Engineering degree. But it was expensive, student life seemed detached from reality, and I was piling on debt. I decided to leave and live with my parents while attending a commuter school and getting what many would consider a lesser degree while working 2-3 jobs at a time. Many people (including myself at times) thought I was heading down the wrong road, and had questioned my decisions.
I ended up with very little debt, had multiple job offers by my junior year, and now I'm living a life I could only dream of. I don't mean to toot my horn or whatever, I just think that what you said isn't always the case. I have no regrets for getting a 'good enough' degree, and think it was one of the best decisions of my life for various reasons.
> We will continue planning with the hope and expectation of bringing undergraduates back to Stanford at the earliest possible time. If public health conditions allow, we plan to invite frosh, sophomores and new transfer students to be in residence on campus for the winter quarter, and juniors and seniors for the spring quarter.
[0] https://healthalerts.stanford.edu/covid-19/2020/08/13/autumn...
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/09/15/yale-formalizes-fr...
The system is broken. The very existence of Stanford is a symptom of the problem.
The level of fear is frankly ridiculous. People get sick and people die. One day, we will all die. That is the human condition. Life must go on. This is not the Black Death. A 1% fatality rate, mostly of people already on the cusp of death, is not a reason to bring society to a halt, to lock children inside for months.
Similarly, not everyone on or near campus is a health 19 year old and not every college student can afford to live in their own apartment or with a few healthy roommates. Universities have large numbers of staff of all ages, and no college town functions without a similar all-ages mix of people living near those students. The entire reason why there's so much pressure to re-open is because the lack of federal support means that city and state governments (at least 30 of the states have recent laws preventing them from running a budget deficit during a crisis) are desperate for the revenue generated by those students, and that is another way of saying that lots of people are literally banking on having those students be in contact with a fair chunk of the local economy.
This seems to be an alarmist statement. Any disease with a fever component will leave a small percentage with long term damage, same for diseases affecting the lungs.
From https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
Scary headlines sell papers. I read recently on the BBC about brain damaged covid patients. There were less than 50 in a country of 50+ million. That is not a "much greater percentage".
It does everyone a disservice to spread exaggerated fear.
And so does poo-pooing risk when you have no actual numbers.
Every infectious disease expert I've heard from is puzzled by this disease. The variance of individual outcomes from expected norms is simply impossible to predict. Taking unnecessary risk is the act of a fool.
If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Granted I learned more than I wanted to know about the complications around influenza, and that the numbers are more significant thanI though, but my opinion is reinforced that covid is nothing out of the ordinary for these types of viruses.
>If you or your close ones invite even a small chance of a dire outcome, then you play it safe. And you hope your good neighbors will be likewise considerate.
You asked me about numbers, and now I would like to ask you the same question. What do you mean by even a small chance? Does that small chance include the risk every year from the flu, with all the related complications and possible long term effects? We don't shut the world down every year for that.
I'm not meaning to "poo-poo" risk. I want to quantify it. I'd like an intellectually rigorous response to the situation. I feel like the danger from covid relative to other similar diseases has been exaggerated, so many alarming headlines, for the clicks, not put into context, etc.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/long-term-symp...
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/12/after-covid19-mental-neu...
There are studies looking at permanent changes to various bodily systems - see for example, this one finding cardiac differences in recovered patients:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
There are similar concerns for liver damage, reduced lung capacity, and neurological effects.
Obviously it’s too soon to have high precision numbers for this or level of impact on the rest of someone’s life but it definitely means that the deniers’ favorite framing of the outcomes as 99% ok, 1% fatal is leaving out a lot for the sake of political correctness.
There are people who take a long time to recover from rhinovirus. The question is, at what rate? You'll note that this is not covered in the articles you have linked.
We simply don't have the data -- what we have is a small number of anecdotes, and a bunch of news organizations who are willing to write speculative stories before we know anything. But you could write the same kinds of speculative stories about any illness, if you chose to look.
That JAMA article has serious methodological flaws, by the way: their "Covid" cohort has twice the number of smokers as their "risk-factor matched" group, almost twice as many men, more people with COPD, high cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension...and they report their results in terms of absolute numbers of defects observed. The reported differences between those groups is smaller in magnitude than the number of smokers. It's frankly embarrassing that JAMA chose to publish the study.
For example, I linked to this: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/long-term-symp...
> "I think it's an argument for why we take this disease so seriously," says Dr. Poland. "People who are thinking, especially young people: '(It's a) mild disease, you know. I might not even have any symptoms, and I'm over it.' Whoa. The data is suggesting otherwise. There's evidence of myocardial damage, cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, decreased ejection fractions, pulmonary scarring and strokes.
I'd tend to think that a doctor at the Mayo Clinic who has relevant education, experience, and is actively working in the response has better instincts for whether we should be taking this seriously.
I have the same standard that I apply everywhere: the burden of proof is on the person making the extraordinary claims. I don't care if that person is a hypochondriac telling me about secret herbal cures for cancer, or medical doctors who haven't done their statistics correctly. When I can look at the data myself and see that they haven't done their math right, I disregard their opinions.
Having spent my fair share of time "in the medical community", I'm here to tell you that there are plenty of doctors and nurses and professors out there who are more than willing to give a reporter a salacious quote just to get their name in the press or their paper in a better journal. Doctors are humans too: they rush to judgment, fall victim to bias, and get dazzled by the idea of seeing their name in print.
So far we have a few (mostly bad) papers describing a small number of the most serious cases, a few (really bad) papers that have gone on statistical fishing expeditions, and an absolutely credulous news media, willing to amplify any speculative claim for clicks. So no, I don't cede my critical thinking skills to an authority figure, just because that figure is in a lab coat.
Can you quantify this?
A 1% mortality rate in the US (if everyone gets it) is 4 million people. The US fought the longest war in their history over 3000 deaths.
That all is ignoring permanent, non-fatal damage. There's reasonable evidence at this point that Covid infections do long-term damage, even to healthy people. I'm reasonably healthy and young, and neither my lungs nor my sense of smell have recovered fully since I had it in March. Are you really arguing to sacrifice the quality of life of millions of people at the altar of economic progress?
[0] https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
It is already a known fact that diseases with fever and/or lung components leave a small percentage of people with long term damage. Covid is like the flu in this regard.
From https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
>COVID-19: Lasting damage to the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain and other organs is possible after a severe case of COVID-19.
>Flu: Influenza complications can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscles (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure.
It seems that people are surprised that this happens, and/or think covid is different in degree. The numbers I have seen so far are quite small and unsuprising, for example less than 50 people with long-lasting fever damage in a country of 50+ million.
Do you have any sources claiming covid is different in this regard than any other fever/lung disease?
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi-demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
Like I said, covid is no different than the flu in this regard. The above linked paper is full of other case studies showing similar data, from 1918 to the 2000s.
While reading up on your citation I found tons of literature out there talking about how common this is with other bacterial and viral infections.
EDIT: I grant that the numbers for myocardial inflammation are not insignificant. I'm learning as I go. But I'll stand by my opinion that covid is not (historically) anything out of the ordinary, just another coronavirus that made the jump to people, like so many before, and lockdowns are not going to eradicate it.
https://publichealth.wustl.edu/heatlhspan-is-more-important-...
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
You also overlook the many people on campus who are over age 30 -- all profs, and most academic and support staff. Infected students will mix with them and increase their risk to a dangerous degree that none of them would welcome.
Or are you thinking that you can run a college with only students and no staff? Dream on.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Besides, by your argument, why should we even have bothered eradicating polio?
>why should we even have bothered eradicating polio?
Because it doesn't require locking down significant part of the population...
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/poliomyelit...
Comparing covid-19 to polio with regard to the danger to kids is absurd.
The 70 year old professors and obese 50 year old professors clearly are able to online teach, why make everyone lose?
Heck if students went to college we'd get closer to herd immunity.