These basal, fundamental flaws in the educational system give me pause to awe, and a gut feeling the US is gonna get trampled many times over by the likes of China within some decades. So little regulation and such harsh capitalism is eating its heart out bit by bit. I guess what keeps America bright at this point is a legacy from the past century, that's slowly eroding, and the brain drain sucked chiefly out of Asia and Eastern Europe--at least the same hands-off market attracts those people with today a stronger educational background than the average educated American, but how sustainable is it to keep importing talent? Is the power of capital enough to keep the american infrastructure and investment momentum on american grounds indefinitely?
Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government. Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government. Most university students go to public schools. Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.
Harsh capitalism would be harsh on the universities who cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries. It would punish universities who don't produce results, instead of giving them students with free loans from the taxpayers. Harsh capitalism would see universities that can't evolve disappear.
I feel like blaming things on capitalism and lack of regulation is so overplayed and fashionable that people can't take a second to think that maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place. Everything the government does right is lauded while everything it does wrong is blamed on "corporate interests" and capitalism.
> 'cling to a dying lecture/exam model that hasn't evolved for centuries'
It dawned on me this week that Y Combinator itself is structured more like this 'dying lecture/exam model', set in a physical place where 'students' and 'instructors' can interact directly rather than being intermediated by some app, screen or paper. If there is any group in any place who would be more likely to disrupt education by the application of high tech, I'd be surprised. That they adopt a model you say is dying suggests that there may be more life in it that might be expected.
Indeed. Proximity facilitates our communication and judgement faculties in a way that is hard to replicate online (although it is a very interesting problem to contemplate). Is it possible to replicate the experience of following a professor out of a classroom and getting a summer research position from the ensuing conversation? The subtle cues and trust-building of both direct and group conversation? Video chat helps, but it's not the same. One small aspect: it seems easier to "turn off" a digital interaction.
> Our education system is propped up chiefly because of government.
Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students need 6 figure loans to graduate.
> Most of the US goes to public schools, controlled by the government.
As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
> Students get ridiculous loans they can't default on, courtesy of the government.
The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to universities without needing loans. If Universities are public, they should admit based on merit. And instead of cycling money through govt to student to university, just subsidize the university and make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed. Maybe if it is too hard, just increase % of admitted students based on merit, some that couldn't quite make it and are rich perhaps could buy their way in.
> maybe regulation and government caused the problem in the first place.
Can you point to an example of an attested and well functioning higher learning system not regulated and propped by a government?
>As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
False dichotomy. There are plenty of things that fit in between "rapacious megacorporations" and "government cronies". Like, for example, unsubsidized nonprofit educational institutes. You know, like you might have found in the 19th - first half of the 20th century.
No, 'going back to the 19th century (-first half of the 20th century)' is equivalent to imagining a higher education system without student loans. Don't see what the big deal is.
The point I was trying to make was that somehow it was easier to imagine time travelling than just looking "across the pond", oh to say Sweden. Or probably other civilised countries.
In the 19th century and the pre-social-democratic 20th century, most universities had no student loans because they charged steep fees in cold cash. If you want to eliminate student debt without eliminating students, you need to look at the social-democratic universities of the post-WW2 era.
that's not true; the pre-interest cost of universities has outstripped inflation many many fold in the last 30 years. The pre-WW2 era colleges were almost certainly less expensive in real purchasing power terms than they are now.
> Obviously not propped enough if this professor died in poverty and students need 6 figure loans to graduate.
I argue that it is precisely because of government intervention that these things happen.
> As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
Are you implying that without government, we as a society would be unable to educate people?
> The problem is not to just stop giving loans, but let people go to universities without needing loans.
That will make universities even more inefficient. Do you know what will ensure "make sure it doesn't spend money on admin assistants, triple layers of bureaucracy, new gyms with lazy rivers and other crap that is not needed?" The fear of failure that universities don't experience now. The fear that if you don't do your job, students will not willingly give you money. "Harsh capitalism" solves that problem.
> Are you implying that without government, we as a society would be unable to educate people?
Well I don't have to imply you just have to show a few example of a successful world renown university run completely outside the control of a government. There are example of successful higher education institutions controlled and sponsored by governments. Western Europe has those example.
> The fear of failure that universities don't experience now.
Again, can you show one single example of a university outside the control of government that accomplishes and is driven by this mythical fear.
> "Harsh capitalism" solves that problem
Be honest now, have you been reading some Ayn Rand? That is fiction you know that, right?
> I argue that it is precisely because of government intervention that these things happen.
It may very well be that the various 20th-century post-war G.I. Bills started the college bubble in the first place, by democratizing the expectation of higher education to the lower classes for the first time in history.
> As opposed to what? Controlled by Coca-Cola? Starbucks? -- "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed"
My primary issue with school vouchers is the poor state of private schools, at least here in GA (outside of the major cities like Atlanta and Savannah). The Catholic schools are decent to good, but often are only K-8. There are few private secular schools. The rest of the private schools are very conservative "Christian Academy" types whose education leaves their students complete morons in some fields (math, science, history, civics; I guess, really, everything).
I bet that if we switched to vouchers then you'd see a lot of new private schools catering to a wider audience. It also might be reasonable to exclude private schools with religious instruction from the voucher program.
I'd like to be that optimistic, and maybe it'd happen, but the politics around here would make it unlikely.
Also, wrt the exclusion of religious schools, that'd be a non-starter in the southern states at least. It'd probably make more sense to mandate some minimum curricula or require that inspectors be able to attend the school unannounced if the school is receiving public moneys via vouchers. There'd likely be a tantrum about religious oppression, but, really, man and dinosaurs, contrary to the teachings at many of the churches and Christian academies around here, really didn't live together [1].
[1] Ok, in the conventional sense of dinosaurs, not the XKCD sense of birds as living dinosaurs. http://xkcd.com/1211/
Wow, most other places in the US it is the opposite. Private schools are considered superior. They have to be, because there is otherwise no reason to both pay property taxes and also pay tution.
Around here it's largely politics and religion, not the quality of the school. There's one catholic school with a good academic reputation. The other two I know of are ok. The rest of the private schools are bad to mediocre. They may be better in some ways than the public schools, but not enough (IMO) for the tuition costs.
> "Do you have a degree?" -- "I sure do, I graduated with MS in coffee arts (MsCA) from Starbucks University, Phoenix". Or just got a "PhD in applied lobbying from Lockheed".
Not arguing against public funding of education, but you're making a nice point about the inherent BS of degrees that exist merely on paper.
Nobody actually cares about that piece of paper - employers want to know what you DID and what you're CAPABLE of.
A college degree used to be reasonable proof of peoples' abilities, but today conflating the two usually doesn't help. Thus post-college unemployment, or idiots running companies from nice positions.
Is it actually better for students that they can't default on their loans? I usually hear it the opposite way, that even after bankruptcy proceedings you still have your student loan debt following you around.
If the government did not guarantee and subsidize the loans, interest rates would be higher and/or banks would be more careful which students they lent to.
non-dischargeability was probably a 'good intention' gone horribly wrong. Because on the plus side, the student's APRs are lower because the lender can be guaranteed to own a portion of the student's labor for the specified term unless they die. And because the higher educational institutes really ought to be entitled to continue extracting their students' value.
the problem is that higher education is the only product aside from used cars in the US which can be sold without an implied warranty of merchantability.
I don't know about US grading schemes, but here in Australia, pretty much every course has some form of assignments or series thereof. The assignments can be a small or substantial part of the final mark, or even the total final mark, depending on the kind of course.
I suspect the same is true in US tertiary institutions, and that railing against exams is just a tired old trope. It's hard to believe that it would be the general standard in the US to have the entirety of the final mark attributable to exams. But, like I said, I'm not familiar with their curricula.
My experience is from SUNY Stony Brook (a university run by the state of New York). What goes into the grade, is pretty much entirely up to the professor. I have had very few classes where the whole of the grade was an exam; but there were a few. More often, the homework is some portion of the grade, but it could be minimal (e.g., 10%). For computer science classes and some humanities classes, it was more likely there would be larger projects or term papers. For things like math, the homework was usually a smaller part of the grade. The real advantage of doing the assignments was that you could practice for what would potentially be on the test, and there would be a TA to grade it and give you feedback.
or maybe capitalism isn't the only "heartless" economic system. Central planning bureaucrats have been responsible for far more suffering globally than any capitalist ever has.
fair point - how about we call bad people bad people for doing bad things, whatever their political misconceptions?
There are plenty of examples of humans being mean to each other in pretty much every setting. America's allergic reaction to public healthcare is an example of a systemic/cultural cause of significant unnecessary suffering[1]. Sure historically communists have done much worse, and indeed still are in North Korea, but that's not much of a target to beat.
Are you sure this is the defense you want to muster? Universities are basically where liberalism/progressivism comes from. It is where it is in its strongest power. Government money everywhere; tuition, research grants, special projects, tax breaks. Administrative staff benevolently administrating massive diversity programs of every kind. 90%+ of the staff are progressives/liberals. Not being progressive/liberal can be pretty much reason to be drummed out. It is the very beating heart of the anti-"capitalist" regime, the blueprint by which they would remake the rest of the world.
And it's still under assault by "little regulation" and "harsh capitalism"? If it's so frail in the real world, then pack it in; the philosophy has no hope of success. It will never find any more fertile ground than it has there. If you don't like the result of decades of liberalism/progressivism's control, perhaps it's time to find a new governing philosophy.
There is a lot of government involvement in American universities, but in weird pseudo-market ways, like grant programs (to institutions) and subsidized loans (to students). They're not a good example of the non-market model, which is much simpler: public universities, funded by tax money, staffed by civil servants, charging no tuition. Some U.S. states had this model through the 1970s, and it worked fine. Parts of Europe still have it, and it works fine, too.
I've been at both American and Danish universities, and the American universities today really do not seem progressive to me. Many professors will claim to be left-ish, sure, but structurally the universities are not run according to a traditional public-service model, and are not internally egalitarian. Their structure, with tons of administrators, large pay differences, odd systems of performance reviews, people job-hopping for pay raises, administrators desperately looking for revenue, etc., reminds me of American corporations more than it reminds me of public service. Just the pay inequality in itself is shocking, more like corporate levels than civil-service levels. An American Dean's salary might be twenty times or more what a PhD student is paid, and professors' salaries might differ by 2-4x even within just the tenure-track segment. In Denmark the entire range from "highest paid professor" to "lowest paid PhD student" is maybe 2.5x, and professors' salaries are on a boring civil-service scale with about 30% variation. This already makes the American environment much more like a company: competitive, hierarchical, not really egalitarian, big focus on revenues (for the institution) and salary/advancement (for the employee).
There are admittedly things the American university model does do well; it's well regarded in research, for example. But one thing it is not, is a straightforward public system along the lines of what a social-democratic government might run. (One might say the same about the healthcare system, for that matter.)
But that doesn't mean UC Berkeley is actually run in a socialist way, particularly if most of the power rests with a Board of Trustees, with the state government, or with administrators rather than with a Faculty Senate.
Such little regulation? What about Common Core, and the long history of ineffective state mandates to "improve" the education system? The education system is highly regulated, and nearly entirely state-run (not counting those few who are able to afford private school tuition on top of school taxes or the time to homeschool). Many, if not most, schools in the U.S. resemble prisons. Top-down. Hierarchical. Rigid. Compulsory.
And if you look at the history of the state education system, it was largely modeled after the Prussian education system, set up by the king, which "attempted to instill social obedience in the citizens through indoctrination [...] The purpose of the system was to instill loyalty to the Crown and to train young men for the military and the bureaucracy." [1] And I would argue that the school system serves a similar function today.
Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well.
Just amazing that you and goldfeld are both right - the US education system is at once inadequately designed, and also being sieged by corporate interests as well. Doesn't hurt that some school administrators don't reasonably respond/engage with parents except those who have lawyers, which parents unfortunately engage without trying to engage the school first.
Ultimately though, I think the sad state of schools in this country is a (big) symptom of society's greater ills. Rampant corporatism, anti-intellectualism, and creeping authoritarianism from a runaway security industrial complex have been happening for decades... and schools are just one aspect of the decay of the social fabric.
On one side we have wealth consolidating much faster than the economy is growing, and on the other side we have the military industrial complex sucking up any increase in taxation to bloat its own oppressive bureaucracy, to say nothing of the resolving door between them.
I can't help but get the feeling that a dystopia is congealing around us with no way out politically. A lot of intellectuals have foreseen the ills of unbounded capitalism that are really starting to set in now, but I don't think anyone has proposed a credible solution.
Well, I think if we want to start thinking about these, it needs to become publicly acceptable to say that capitalism is an evil vampire squid trying to suck your blood rather than a cuddly huggable teddy-bear that solves all your problems.
See: this entire thread, in which the solution to corporatization of the university is almost automatically assumed to be adding more capitalism.
That's because every variant of Marxism that's been tried in the world has led to widespread violence and misery. People are understandably reluctant to try it again.
Sorry, I was thinking about No Child Left Behind, which was an Act of Congress. You're right -- Common Core is implemented differently. From what I know, it was mainly drafted up by testing corporations, but has the support of the Obama administration. Since the federal government has levers and dials it can use (i.e. fines, penalties, withholding grants, etc.) then it seems to me like the end result will be the same.
Common Core was one standard that states could adopt, and they could also develop their own, that would satisfy requirements to gain additional funding. Essentially, the Feds said: Improve your curricula because what's out there sucks, if you do, we'll give you a bonus.
Texas and others developed their own standards, for example.
No Child Left Behind is anti-productive. How anyone could believe an education initiative by a president who thinks captain crunch discovered america in 1975 could be of any value is beyond me.
> Based on the goals of social obedience and instilling loyalty to the state... Well, I think in those terms our education system is doing quite well.
Teacher wages approaching subsistence level is just the next step in the McDonaldization of education. Even the teachers are just another brick in the wall.
Agree with this. Perhaps the silver lining is that it could incentivize educators to opt-out of the state education system in favor of more entrepreneurial avenues? Like, private tutoring, teaching online classes, workshops, apprenticeships, etc.
A lot of good educators do this. And that's part of the problem. Private tutoring and online classes don't reach the masses of students. I mean, if we want to deliberately exclude the majority of the population from being able to receive an education, then sure, let's go this way.
If you think college teachers should be well paid, it means you think college education is worth a lot. If you think it's worth a lot, then it means it is expensive. If it is expensive, it makes sense that lots of people can't afford it. You can't pay teachers a lot if you have them teach poor people. Otherwise where is the money supposed to come from?
Reducing the Eurozone crisis to "taxes" is a non-argument. Especially considering that Scandinavia is doing pretty well, and the local tax rate, speaking from personal experience, is one of the highest in the world.
Not sure which country you're talking about exactly, but don't countries in Scandinavia benefit from large resources of oil and natural gaz in the North Sea? That sure eases welfare.
I'm a French expat living in Denmark, which is definitely not blessed by large amounts of resources of any kind. But you could take Germany as another example of a country who is not about to run out of other people's money any time soon.
Or to take examples in a different way: Spain and Ireland's issues were mostly caused by a housing bubble.
« Denmark has considerably large deposits of oil and natural gas in the North Sea and ranks as number 32 in the world among net exporters of crude oil[101] and was producing 259,980 barrels of crude oil a day in 2009 »
It seems I have underestimated the Danish oil reserves. However, oil export is a small fraction of its economy. I haven't been able to find an accurate figure, but according to Danmark statistik [1], it was about 8.17% of Danish exports in April 2014, which is very far from making Denmark into an oil-based economy like Norway is.
So our lack of regulation will leave us susceptible to... China's notorious lack of regulation and corruption? Most of China's "advantages" in the last decades have been thanks to e.g. their ability to pay slave labor wages (vs our minimum wage laws), their ability to have horrible work conditions (vs our regulations), etc etc. We may "lose" to China, but I assure you it won't be because we're less regulated of more capitalistic.
Your ideology is getting in the way of clear thinking. Good luck on your prediction on China's future prowess in the education of non-Chinese students. Lack of government regulation (and financing) is probably the opposite of the problem in the US (do you realize that most US colleges are run by state governments?).
Ideological blindness aside there is something wrong when education costs more and more but the instructors are paid less and less.
I disagree, while there are glaring problems within U.S. educational systems there are two significant factors mitigating how crippling they are long term.
1. Opportunities, there are tons of opportunities in U.S., if you want to learn you will find a way to despite all the flaws.
2. Immigration, there are a lot of highly educated people immigrating into U.S.
Additionally we still cannot anticipate how whole MOOCs business will turn out.
So yes the are problems and they are very bad, but not as crippling as you might expect.
The very reason US education (higher education) is better is because government has kept its dirty nose out of it. American Public schools are pathetic.
