Life gets shitty.exe

@PantHeist she’s not the only one not qualified…

@PantHeist Don’t you know, the current administration loves the poorly educated.

@PocketBrain
@luvche21
@PantHeist
Alternative brains for alternative facts.

@PantHeist They’re seriously afraid of Trump, who can call down hellfire (aka his fan club voters) on any who get out of line.

@mfladd no chemistry is fun. Inorganic or organic @legendornothing? Organic chemistry has a bad reputation but is easy once you realize it is all about figuring out what would make the electrons most happy.

@mfladd I love chemistry. I even majored in it.

@CaptAmehrican I never understood why people hated organic- carbonyls are awesome.

@sammydog01 @CaptAmehrican @mfladd

I never took science in college, and the science that I learned in high school was nothing compared to how public high schools teach it, so…

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@CaptAmehrican My biggest issue with organic was all of the memorization.

@mfladd I loved Organic! I deviated from the process they gave us for making nylon and made the best filament in the lab class. Maybe I should have stuck with ChemEng.

@CaptAmehrican I don’t know… that sounds awful Anti-Markovnikov to me.

@mfladd Also, um, I hope the lady in your gify took good notes; she could make a mint off of that knockout gas.

@CaptAmehrican I also hated chemistry. Passed it but hated it. I would have gotten my PhD in human genetics except when I realized just how much more chemistry I’d have to take I decided I just did not want to deal with it.

@f00l I’m always glad to swim in the high quality soup of the meh forums.
Thanks.

@f00l
You mean this toxic waste?

Just proves that under the pollution of lies, alternative lies, and big lies, we’ve all mutated so far toward the weird that we can actually survive here.

@f00l

You can fix everything at once.

Stupid fucking correction due to my stoooopid autoco-rectal iOS keyboard

Should have read
You can’t fix everything at once.

@legendornothing @f00l works for me with software engineering homework all the time.

@PantHeist
Oh that’s right. Excuse me a sec I gotta go do someone’s genetic research for them and then go fix string theory.

brb.

@thismyusername Also MIT OpenCourseWare.

@duodec

Maybe @thumperchick could remove any details she feels should be removed.

@PlacidPenguin @thumperchick I think removing company details is a good idea. If his mom looks for different employment and somehow a search comes up with that exact combination of job info that may well not bode well if someone connects the dots.

@Kidsandliz

If @thumperchick won’t (or is not around), maybe @dave would want to clean some info?

I’d ask @shawn but he’s sleeping in one of the rooms possibly.

@duodec @PlacidPenguin @Kidsandliz - I’d assumed that UGH was a misnomer. Just in case, I edited it.

@Thumperchick The terms were searchable and identifiable.

@duodec holy shit yep prolly shouldn’t have added any of that in there thanks T humper

@tightwad Speaking as some currently paying my own way through college, it’s very tough today. Most people who make your argument are a bit out of touch- look at what a student can expect to earn today vs cost of tuition now compared to when you went to school.

@tightwad I think it’s harder to go to college today.

Since I was in school a few decades ago everything has gone up about 10-fold (gas, bread, houses… well, I quit smoking, cigarettes are up 20-fold), but the cost of public university is up nearly 100-fold. (My tuition was $4.00 per credit hour. Yes, that’s a decimal point. 400 pennies.)

I knew my school would improve my life immensely, but unless you carefully pick a major today you will never make enough to pay off your loans. How would you ever pay for today’s college education on a teacher’s salary?

I would love to see all my grandkids go to college, but they are more realistic than I and several are looking at the trades as a better route to a decent life.

Nobody ever said life wasn’t tough, but if you’re lucky, it can be fun.

@tightwad

Not quite what you would think out there.

Universities and colleges - even some of the best ones - view the availability of student loans as being their private licenses to print money for their expensive research and vanity and corp-partnership projects.

The only limits on this are that, for undergrads, there is a limit in what they can borrow. And grad students have much higher borrowing limits so they can get ripped off that much more.

The the old days public schools got some tax $ and donations, and private schools got donations. And the General funds portions of those were spent, normally, in general maintenance and admin, and on education. A little of it went to high-end research and vanity or blue-sky projects, but a lot of those got special funding on their own.

Then the state legislatures cut back on funding at the same time that prestige schools started to be the only thing that matters, so a school’s rep and it’s student and corp-project draw, so every school that wants to survive has to be a prestigious school.

How to fund all this very nice but very expensive shit?

Why, that would be thru raising tuition. After all, the students can just go borrow the money. And everyone knows a student will borrow to go to a better school with a better rep that costs more, cause that can mean so much to your career.

So they jack tuition. Kids gotta normally get college degrees to have great careers, esp n any area w hard knowledge. So the school can grow and students pay the bill.

And the uni spends a tiny proportion of the tuition increases over the last 20 years in undergrad education. Nice ROI. For the school.

Where does the rest go? Well, a major institution has gotta have faculty stars. Nobel-level or big-rep level people. You get them by offering $ and a rich intellectual environment in which to work, which mean a there stars and notable people. Both those are very expensive. (Your kid in school will never meet these important faculty members).

And you wanna partner with corp interests to do all kinds of high-prestige research and investigation. That costs money too - the corps only wanna pay for a bit of it. And your uni wants to to major research, in brand new buildings with brand new labs. And have fancy visiting profs. And on and on and on. And fancy special programs for intellectual stars.

And of course managing all this is like managing GE or another big corp. so the school must seriously pay serious $ to the big name high-rep admin people. And of course, unis want ever increasing #'s of tech patents they can license out. Getting those patents costs money your local students get to pay in tuition.

What about the $ coming in from patents? Well, that usually goes into funding research for more patents. Not into doing stuff for the students who paid for and should own a piece of those patents in the first place.

$$$$$$$$

They all have some donors. And a few unis are rich.

But basically - drive by any school w a good rep. See all that construction? Imagine what’s going into those buildings in terms of infrastructure? Imagine paying for the stars and labs and prestige programs inside this buildings?

Look at the tuition bill and the student loan plan they offer to your kid. That’s where the $ comes from. To find a massive high-tech research and prestige and ego-boost-quest for for local institution so that it get can bigger and more important and attract more expensive stars and students who can borrow money and keep funding that growth.

The growth of American unis is not intrinsically evil. They do great things. But they really outta find another way to finance it and quit asking 18 year olds to finance stuff they will never gain benefit from.

There is a local 2 year specialty MBA program - computer and classroom stuff - for which the bill is about $200k.

Now how much per student does the material actually cost to deliver? 10k? 20k perhaps? But for certain jobs having that MBA is a plus.

Nice profit margin there. Goldman-Sachs should take lessons. It’s a seller’s market value secstudents think they gotta have it. And the school collude terribly on pricing, but not openly, and not provably. They know what each other is doing without having to ask.

How many 18 year olds or 25 year olds actually understand what it means to take on serious debt? (Something close to zero.). How does a kid or their parents evaluate whether a student will ever recoup the cost? There’s no simple or easy way. How do you figure out if what you purchase is worth the $? Good one. Nobody knows. There is no way to evaluate whether these programs are worth the cost except to go with a semi-educated gut-based guess. That’s it.

Oh - and what about intellectual enquiry beyond the purely technical? Hmmm. Some schools do a great job. Others - they do ban it. They pay lip service or ignore it. It’s not profitable, you see.

And what about students who have emotional, financial, personal, academic stress? Whose lives don’t go well? Who graduate into a crashed economy owing all that money? Or whose fields collapse or are off-shored? Or who train and enter good field and suddenly the pay scale changes for the worse? An employee is a commodity that can be written off and dumped now. (And getting re-trained into a new field is even more expensive).

Ask the schools and unis?

Hell. Ain’t nobody dere got time fo’ dat.

There is something very disturbing right now in the cold dark heart of American higher education.

They don’t give a fuck what happens to their students later as long as they are not publicly embarrassed by it.

@2many2no

No kidding.

The cost of higher ed is going up way faster even than the cost of healthcare.

The right mechanic specialty can be a decent thing. Specially if you can run your own biz.

Or self-taught coding.

Kids gotta, at age 15 or earlier, start viewing the economy - all of it, including edu - esp edu - like it’s out there trying to fuck them.

That so sux.

@f00l It’s admittedly a small part of overall cost, but also this:

and a large percentage of em need codes for one thing or another which stops you from buying international, used, or visiting the library genesis.

@PantHeist @f00l

When I was in a certain college (the first of 2), there was a book I needed which was written by a professor on campus.

It cost a bit over $130.

Otherwise, most of the books were relatively cheap.

@PantHeist
And textbooks are a legal monopoly and. And exactly what kickbacks do some of the profs get for choosing that book?

I hate to be this way, but anyone who pirates a textbook - I can’t entirely argue with that choice.

Textbook publishers are fucking assholes. And some of the books: if a book catches on, any idea how much money there is in that for the writer? Just laugh. Cause you don’t really wanna know the answer.

Why is there a new, slightly changed, version of Samuelson each year? Cause then the used ones are presumably worthless and you have to pay $.5M for the new one.

Oh yeah and the publishers wanna sell/lease the e-versions with their shitty special textbook sw cause that gives them more control.

I wonder how much Samuelson and Co have earned over all these years.

@f00l

I had a professor who said we could buy a certain book on the campus bookstore, on Amazon, or “elsewhere”.

Some professors are told they have to actively promote the bookstore, and can’t even mention you could buy it online.

This same teacher said we could get certain software from the company or “elsewhere”, and she wouldn’t ask questions.

---

There was a class which I didn’t want to go to campus for, the teacher liked me, so she said I could do it remotely and she’d send me anything I needed for the class.

The book we needed was a certain edition, though the previous edition was a fraction of the price.
Not much of a different in content, so I spoke to the teacher. She agreed that they were pretty much the same book, and since she had both editions in the office, she said I could use the old edition of the book.

@PlacidPenguin
You had a prof who had the energy to care and who wasn’t corrupted or desengaged from the real world issues the students faced.

Bravo for that one.

@PlacidPenguin
@PantHeist

Hardback and paperback college books used to cost the same as or very little more than normal general market books of the same approx size that were intended for general bookstores and the reading public.

And now they’re often 20x as much. Even tho the college population is increasing in size rapidly, so they have more economies of scale.

Hmmm.

Could it be that magical gremlins use spells to make the cost of producing a printed and bound textbook so much more expensive? (Consider that textbooks often require far less marketing costs).

Or could it be that once you’ve enrolled in a specific course in a specific school you have no choice and you are fucked and have to buy it no matter what. So they can charge whatever they want that falls short of creating a likelihood of Congressional hearings on the price of textbooks?

So just borrow that money and buy that book and shut up, fucker. They’ve got you exactly where they want you.

@tightwad Well I live in an area with both and for the most part the Charter schools suck and regularly fail to meet requirements. This more about the 1% getting vouchers to defray the cost of Bifftad’s boarding school education. Another freebie from the middle-class.

@f00l

She cares about her students.

I know that a lot of teachers say they do, but usually they don’t care so much.

Even years after leaving this college, I’ve spoken to her.

@PantHeist Yeah but if you have time you can buy them overseas and they are way cheaper even with postage. Or used.

@f00l Thank you for taking the time to articulate… pretty much everything I feel about higher education today.

After being told my entire life that I would need a degree to avoid flipping burgers forever, and then spending three and a half years at a private college that nickel and dimed students like it was going out of style, my perspective has changed a fair bit. My fiancee and I met at that school and have both decided that if we have kids, we’ll be perfectly fine with them going into a trade if that’s what they choose to do. My friends who went into trades are off building lives and buying houses, meanwhile I’m barely scraping by because of student loans. Had literally anyone told me that this is how it would be, I probably would not have gone to college. Myself, my parents, my friends, their parents - everyone was misled.

High school kids should be taught “real world finance,” and lesson one should be the average amount of debt that students are in after graduating compared to ROI on those degrees. Because that’s what it is, or what it was supposed to be - an investment. I feel bad for anyone going to law school in 2017.

Looking back now, I probably would have been better served by becoming an electrician than spending my college time trying and failing to find a major that compelled me and wouldn’t leave me broke. I like to tinker! Now I work in IT, in a job that values certifications way more than a degree. And my tinkering is rewarded.

@Kidsandliz

and a large percentage of em need codes for one thing or another which stops you from buying international, used, or visiting the library genesis.

@Kidsandliz
Some poor students used to get math books from Taiwan. No copyright enforcement. They had all the titles. It was like Taiwan had a book duplicator from the Starship Enterprise.

@PantHeist
Exactly.

So you not only can’t pirate or buy from Asia much of the time, you have to purchase new or your homework doesn’t count.

Fuckers.

@harveydanger

Again, exactly. It’s such a fucking racket now, even if the knowledge handed out or gained is good stuff.

My younger bro went to law school (a podunk law school, quite decent but no rep) at night and has done well. But he already had a family, children, and a very decent career. The law degree was to mesh with his existing career and it did. And he went to law school way back when.

And he had the advantage of being able to get an interview and hired anywhere, because of his undergrad school and degree, so he’s had a reasonably prestigious law career also.

Even then, and making decent $, and even with his wife also having a nice career, the loans weren’t paid until he was in his 40’s.

And now it’s worse. I suspect a lot of law students will get a pretty bad ROI. I suspect a lot of college students will get terrible ROI.

I’d like to see a decent and accurate RII calculator.

I think it was in the 1990’s when I started to hear stories that made me realize that universities had gone over to the Dark Side in terms of their financial relationships to the students.

And, of course, that’s the one piece of significant knowledge that universities don’t wish to study, or have widely known. Of course.

Makes me see red, in case no one noticed.

@PantHeist Yes but you can ask if you will need the code. If not then you are set.

@Kidsandliz I’m aware, doesn’t help that you often do for interactive stuff, labs, and math homework

@PantHeist
@Placidpengiun

A bunch of courses have the projects and homework assigned to be done thru the book publisher’s POS sw package. So if you don’t have the code you got by purchasing the new textbook, you can’t login to the package, and post and turn in the work. And profs go along with this!

I have heard that some prof’s are kinda forced to do this. It’s a condition a given school might set for that prof teaching that course. And the profs are told not to disclose this. I have heard students say they have been told this by profs on the downlow.

No hard evidence. I haven’t been in school for a long time.

But if true, in that case the school has a collusive financial relationship with the textbook publisher. Which the school for some reason or other, fails to disclose to the students.

@PantHeist The quality of some of that stuff is pretty poor. Typically I don’t use it. If students want to use it for review, no problem, but I design my own stuff and ignore what is in many of those resources. If there were ace resources there I might reconsider, however in my experience in the subjects I teach what is there is typically mediocre at best. I also realize this may be subject dependent and faculty dependent.

@Kidsandliz @f00l For me, C++ has extra chapters at the end that are only accessible with the code- extra tricky because the code is only good for 6 months and it’s a 2 semester book. Fortunately, my professor warned us not to use it until the second semester.

Math classes webassign is fine, but I wish I didn’t have to use it. Especially since for the most recent one you HAVE to buy the ebook directly from the publisher- there’s no other way to get the webassign code. No stand alone code purchase, not hard copy of the book and code bundle option.

@PantHeist
I hate them. Exactly what part of antitrust isn’t that practice?

And you rented instead of purchasing the e-book, because that price would have been even more insane.

College has turned into a financial survival of the fittest chase. And that’s while you’re still in school. Not even mentioning the decades of being financially indentured after the fact, while you watch the stellar career path you chose carefully dry up and blow away.

Exactly what all does that have to do with learning, intellectual enquiry, et al? Or with reasonable opportunity for everyone capable?

@kidsandliz, somehow I suspected you didn’t do that.

@Kidsandliz @f00l

@PlacidPenguin
Loud and Proud.

@PlacidPenguin STUPID STUPID STUPID… and just what does he intend to do about all the functions they take care of? Some of which are critical. Sheesh. Some of these dumb asses are so short sighted.

@Kidsandliz

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ask him. His stance is because he doesn’t believe it’s the position of the president or his appointees to determine the educational curriculum.

@PantHeist Good job on paying your own way…it’s a novel concept that too many grasp or have not been taught. Is it easy? Certainly not. I worked 2-3 part time jobs during my first years and full time during my later years. I didn’t graduate at 22ish, it took me a few years longer. I didn’t attend the more expensive options, I started at the community college then moved to a University with an associates degree. I started in a trade (welding/Automotive) and used that as a way to gain a job that would allow me to pay my way for the later years. Am I wildly successful and rich? Not hardly…but I am able to provide for my family and encourage them to pursue their dreams…and nothing makes a dream more fulfilling that achieving it and knowing you did more than just attend…you earned it!

@2many2no I am not as old as you (based on money conversion)…my original community college is about 2.5x more than it was when I went.

@tightwad I’m 29, work 40 hours a week, take 18+ credits a semester to minimize total cost, and take classes year round to make it so I get get into the jobs that actually pay faster. My only loans are federal and I’m finishing a BS from a respected school in just over 2 years (total- started last summer, finishing spring 2018). I’m perpetually broke, I sleep an average of four and a half hours a night, and have pretty much no social life besides hanging around with the wife. Obviously it can be done. It also is worth it if you plan well. That doesn’t mean that it’s the best system for the most people, or that we should remove the (already comparatively little) government help available.

@tightwad by the way- how much has your university tuition gone up?

@tightwad Sorry if that came across as too irritable. Been a long, cold week.

@f00l
On this post above
https://meh.com/forum/topics/life-is-shitty-exe#589ba4dc045e3d0bf0c65317

regarding textbook publisher’s proprietary horrible e-book sw, “POS” means “piece of shit”, not “point of sale”.

I doubt anyone was confused, but jic.

@f00l
Re my mention of “Samuelson”. I made a serious errror, accusing this book of being revised annually, for the likely reason of bumping sales. Someone I know slightly who took Econ recently told me their textbook was of that “annual-revision” type. It seems that student was not using Samuelson’s book and i either jumped to a poor conclusion or remembered in error.

Up the thread, I was referring to the textbook:

Economics
By Paul A Samuelson, PhD.

A little about the author:

Paul A. Samuelson
1915-2009
B.A., University of Chicago
Ph.D. Harvard University
Faculty, MIT 1940-death
Nobel Prize in Economics, 1970

From the Nobel citation:

More than any other contemporary economist, Samuelson has helped to raise the general analytical and methodological level in economic science. He has simply rewritten considerable parts of economic theory. He has also shown the fundamental unity of both the problems and analytical techniques in economics, partly by a systematic application of the methodology of maximization for a broad set of problems. This means that Samuelson’s contributions range over a large number of different fields.

From Wikipedia:

Stanislaw Ulam once challenged Samuelson to name one theory in all of the social sciences which is both true and nontrivial. Several years later, Samuelson responded with David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage: “That it is logically true need not be argued before a mathematician; that is not trivial is attested by the thousands of important and intelligent men who have never been able to grasp the doctrine for themselves or to believe it after it was explained to them.”

The textbook was written entirely by Samuelson and first published in 1948. All the revisions were done solely by Samuelson until 1985 (Samuelson was 70 by then), when Samuelson began a collaboration with William Nordhaus of Harvard University. Since Dr Samuelson’s death, Dr Nordhaus has been solely responsible for the periodic revisions.

Wanted to check out what was going on with this textbook.

This was the dominant textbook (including all fields of study) for 30-40 years, and gained enormous prominence due to its clarity, analytic and mathematical approach to Econ, and Dr Samuelson’s welll-earned academic prominence.

It is, I believe, no longer the best-selling textbook in the US, or perhaps not even in Econ; but still sells extremely well and is updated regularly. It is considered by many to be the most influential single textbook of the 20th century; this book offered and taught the basic analytic template for most post-war economic public policy in western economies, including ours.

The updates for this particular textbook appear to be focused on the need for freshening the materials and perspectives rather than the need for juicing sales. I was flat wrong: this book is not updated annually in order to force students to purchase new versions. I’m glad to learn the current author/editor, Dr Nordhaus, and the publisher don’t use that particular cheap trick with this book. The book still sells well, and has been translated into 41 languages.

Other textbook writers and publishers are not so scrupulous. I know of a person taking basic courses at a local junior college. Many of the textbooks for these courses are updated annually and the homework or special assignments must be submitted through the publisher’s website. The student cannot login to the website without purchasing a new book in order to receive the necessary code. The e-books often cost more than $200 apiece to purchase, with semester-leasing available for somewhat less.

I don’t know, but suspect, that many of these newer textbooks (many in e-book only, possibly to avoid the used book market altogether) are commissioned by the publishing house and “written to spec” with the final copyright possibly going jointly to the academic writer and to the publishing house; or else the author and publisher having special royalty and publishing arrangements with these books.

The textbook:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_(textbook)
From The Economist (magazine), 1997
http://www.economist.com/node/154859
http://mskousen.com/1999/09/the-perseverance-of-paul-samuelsons-economics/

Dr Samuelson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Samuelson
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/economy/14samuelson.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all&referer=

The versions of this book I read around in and messed with was the top image.
Never took Econ but had a very good friend back then who breathed it.

@f00l I remember this textbook (top version). Yes, I was an econ geek until my college eliminated the major and I went on to discover other classroom delights.

@Barney
Your college eliminated the Econ major???!!!

I know of colleges with total student body count <500 who offered Econ majors. WTF. How could they do that and still call themselves a liberal arts college?

PS: I’m sure the reason that textbook is not so dominant now is that it was never published with a purple binding AFAIK.

@Barney
PPS
One of the people once I shared a large student house with is now very high up in the Federal Reserve.

He was always really nice. I haven’t spoken to him since a few years outta college - no FaceBook back then. But I have this mad idea that if I were in the city where he works, I could call his office and I’d be able to get him to have lunch with me. He is - or was - that sorta person. Plus he borrowed my car (my parent’s loaner car) a bunch, so I’m owed.

Econ is really cool when it’s not being co-opted by doctrinarist assholes.

@f00l re: public university pricing
Notice that the whole negative cycle begins when state legislatures reduced funding levels to below what it actually costs to run a state college system, freeing (almost forcing) these public institutions to turn themselves into Big Business: focused on money-making & growth, rather than higher education.

@f00l My college was dying. Fewer and fewer students were attending, so the school tried a lot of different things – name change (twice), curriculum changes (lots of those), grade reporting – you name it, they tried it. Eventually they figured it all out and today my little college is a thriving university, albeit a very small university.

But while I was there, the best word to describe it was chaotic. I should have transferred my junior year, because once again they were discussing eliminating my new major (poli sci), but with a lot of squealing from our department, they kept it, at least for a while, or maybe longer.

I do not follow my alma mater too much, so I don’t know what they now offer, but as I said, they are doing okay now.

@Barney
A lot of small colleges have really struggled to survive the last 50 years. If you were a “name” college you were usually fine. Otherwise - prestige and name recognition became such enormous values over all others to prospective be students because those really paid in status and in the grad school and job markets.

If a small school didn’t already have prestige, prestige was quite difficult and expensive to acquire, and many places just didn’t have the resources. The fact that the school was a perfectly fine place to get an education no longer mattered - that became seen as a slightly sleepy value from the 50’s or before that was meaningless in the modern marketplace. And a nearly invisible small school could easily slip, nearly invisibly, into a death spiral. Fewer students wishing to attend means even fewer students will want to attend next year.

Have no stats, but think an astonishing # of small liberal arts colleges either had to fold or merge or get swallowed or become a speciality or distance campus attached to a better known and better funded place. I suspect far more small places will face this soon enough. It’s much like the corporate world. The boutique and crafted iconoclastic schools, the famous schools, the well-funded schools, the eclectic schools, those with specialty programs or a partnership to a “great institution” may be ok. Thes rest …

Glad yours managed to stay alive. Sorry you went thru that. For some reason, I always imagined you as an alumnus of a premier 20K+ student body “state u”.

@f00l Your imagination is not playing tricks on you. Ever since I was a wee child, I had plans to go to the University of Kansas and then to their law school. But in my sophomore year of high school, my dad died suddenly and we could no longer afford KU’s tuition. My little college offered me a pretty good scholarship (I think they were desperate for students). Since I was able to stay at home and commute, this allowed me to get my undergraduate degree.

To this day, I like to think that I “bleed” crimson and blue even though I did not attend KU. The irony is that my college’s color were also red and blue.

@Barney aha! That’s why you like purple!

@PantHeist Hmm, never thought of it THAT way. Most people ask me why I didn’t want to go to Kansas State.

@PantHeist @Barney

I always thought it was because of something from @Barneys childhood.

Kinda right.

@compunaut

Notice that the whole negative cycle begins when state legislatures reduced funding levels to below what it actually costs to run a state college system, freeing (almost forcing) these public institutions to turn themselves into Big Business:

It’s that and more. Yes, in the 70s-90s legislatures sharply reduced funding to way below a sustaining level to state system’s, under pressure from being underfunded in general, or the likes of prop 13 on Ca or because ofvconstitutional limits on taxes combined with the need to fund other increasingly expensive programs. So they cut the uni’s because students could get Pell Grants and federally-guaranteed loans and the like and pay their own.

A real change in the academic marketplace occurred, parallel to global competition in business. It simply no longer mattered if you were decent or pretty good. Those schools were now getting not only the 4th tier faculty (all perfectly competent to research, write, and teach). but were failing to compete in other areas. They were many students’ last choices. They couldn’t get grants in quantity or quality. Corporations didn’t want to partner, there was way too much “juice” in going with a big name school instead. Local state and private uni’s faced the classic small town problem when that happens when Walmart opens its doors. Who will shop at your place anymore? No one really wants to unless you have visible cachet.

Nowadays what matters to a uni, other than its “identity” in academia, is its prestige. Schools - even high prestige schools - actually seriously obsess over the US News and World Report rankings to an amazing degree, even tho the rankings are often objectively silly with regard to small differences (USN&WR is reputed to resolve the top 3-5 schools by coin flip in some years and so have informal rules that the rankings and top spots must vary slightly each year to make it all look legit, and supposedly they do this “adjusting” by hand according the optimal presentation standards. And yet that #2 or #5 matters tremendously to the schools: compared to where you might be if you could move up a few spots.

Faculty draw might be about equal for the top 5 or so, varying by individual program and specialty research. And next 5-10 are nearly as attractive. Some well funded uni’s simply purchase the famous geniuses, paying them as tho they were head coaches at a SE Conf football program (and that’s another argument, but at the big sports schools, football and basketball at least are usually self-funding).

But these famous brains need more than simply $2M a year or whatever: major labs and serious and stimulating colleagues; top level grad students: stipulations that relieve them from ordinary teaching; a pleasant life space; to be at a place that looks like it will be able to naturally attract similar top academic talent in the future; a place with growth and money and corporate support; a place with a powerhouse reputation; to be in a city or town that appreciates them; for the children of the weathly and the top scoring students to want to come. all the pieces of that puzzle must be really really cooking to move forward. Miss even one piece of it and your rep and ranking slip. Way credible synergy tho, if you’ve got all the parts. That stew will be so attractive that it will lure even better versions of each of the pieces quickly. A school moving up is in as much of a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating feedback situation as a school moving down.

But all this takes fuel. And fuel is one simple thing. $$$$$.

So the interests of the students are to attend a prestigious school, do well, get a “name” degree if they can, and not be so strapped by debt that they bankrupt their own futures. But how many 18-25 year olds with all the natural youth optimism really understand debt? Almost none? But they do understand that they will prob have a better career if they attend Harvard than LSU, and if they attend LSU than UT-Rio Grande Valley. These students cannot reasonably evaluate with accuracy which careers will be good 20 years from now or how they will do (some exceptions - nursing is one). They sign the papers to buy their way into the great educational system.

The school’s agenda is something else again. 50 years ago perhaps, education dominated or was nearly co-equal to research and to being a “major institution”. That’s no longer true. In order to survive and thrive, universities must dominate. And dominance takes endless $$$, there’s never enough. The best funded schools in the world: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and UT (with the astonishing PUF) may not have enough money and perhaps never will. In order to stay where they are, they need to grow grow grow grow grow. And only the best of everything will do or you start to slip.

The Ivy Leagues might have enough money, because they’re only responsible for a few thousand students at a time, and are so well funded, and were private to begin with. UT and other state big name academia have another problem - a campus of 30K-50k or more to educate, plus the need to hand over some funds to the outlier and distance systems.

Those students must be guided thru or the school loses all cred. State tuition controls are a thing if the past. Which makes those massive #'s of students something else - something more important to the school than learners or “our future” - an enormous willing herd of cash cattle.

The schools don’t increase costs only to compensate for inflation and lost tax funds. All those big names and big labs and slightly less big names and all those joint projects with outside interests that cost so much become also just a part of the whole. The institution is always ravenous. It always wants more. Just up the tuition and fees. Let the students pay the Beast.

I’ve seen a few journalistic descriptions of studies indicating that most - well more than half - of the recent tuition increases never filter down to the undergrad and may not filter down to any but the very best grad students. I think there are numerous studies backing this. And perhaps it would be ok, if students were fully informed - and if students were, say, 35-40 with a little life experience. You could say that the students, by overpaying for their educations, were effect “buying themselves better degrees in potentia” - by providing the schools within funds in which it invest in clear prestige enhancers.

And many of us might do just that, eyes wide open, for Harvard or CalTech. But how many of us would do that for … a smaller state school charging nearly the same as the big state school that has far more prestige? We’d prob think the extra $ not worth it considering no prestige gain - the only item that is currency beyind the degree itself.

I don’t know how the smaller or less important uni’s will make it through the next 50 years intact. Many of them may die as distance learning takes over. I doubt students will wish to overspend for prestige when they’re taking internet courses, unless it’s top 10 prestige.

Right now starry eyed 18 year olds who know that they must have college in order to have a career don’t understand that they are signing for - present dollars to grow the school for its own purposes in the future, and they will have to pay those bills for far longer than they may think.

Schools are seriously not in a hurry to help the students understand likely future earnings. Or what that debt burden means The young have no idea they might have to put off children or founding their own businesses or buying houses or getting more training or getting behavioral therapy for an autistic child because they are overpaying here and now for education.

I know of some students outta UTD (a quite good school) with good degrees, out in 4 or 4.5 years with near $60 grand in debt who so far have not found decent jobs in their fields. One I heard of lived in a car for a few years in order to work at paying it down, and somehow managed to stay employed. But if course the longer you don’t work in a good job in your field, the less you are worth and the more your currency slips.

The whole system is fucked.

The school are knowingly, silently, part of the fuckedness.

Schools ought to disclose costs and disclose likely ROIs to the degree they can, field by field. Students ought to be told they’re paying far more than the cost of their own edu; that they’re paying to grow and sustain an institution trying to become bigger and better.

Students should have options to get the learning without paying extra for prestige if they choose. Right now that’s very rare.

We ought to be having debates about existing student debt and what to do if there are massive defaults (think 2007-2008+++). We ought to decide how to fund our educational systems when, practically, people need degrees.

Or we could back off it all and do basic education. Much cheaper. Much less debt. Replace the $ somehow with corp partnerships? In that case first bye-bye to anything unprofitable. A few French medievalists can stay as someone’s vanity donation.

And bye-bye to scientific truth, when it gets in the way of profits. How many medical studies are skewed for profit now? And bye-bye open science. The uni’s can all be secret and proprietary.

And that will really really not help us compete w China.

Even worse is the idea of scaling back on non-open research. Then we can really start looking to our future techno-overlords from Beijing. The Chinese don’t have our crazy weirdness about funding edu. They are just gonna fund it and not bankrupt their students, and their students, nearly free of debt, will be able to found businesses and invent tech (^esp military tech*) as fast as they can.

Or we can understand that in some degree edu us a right and a necessity to the individual. And we can just do it.

We can decide we won’t settle for being far second to the Chinese and perhaps others in 50. years. We can treat edu as a matter of critical national security imperative and just do it.

@f00l You forgot the TL;DR summary.
Seriously, decline of small liberal arts schools and reduced funding for state schools and higher student debt did not start 50yr ago, but between 1985-1995 when the cost of borrowing (interest rates) started coming down. Plus recessions gave lawmakers smokescreen to reduce edu spending to unsustainable levels; afterwards it was political suicide to propose raising taxes to bring funding back to previous levels. Once states abdicated their edu funding responsibility, schools had no real choice but to begin downsizing or enter ‘prestige/growth race’ (don’t forget that borrowing is cheap for them as well).

@compunaut
Yeah. If I didn’t make it clear - I got in and out during good times. When schools acted out honorably their spoken and unspoken mandates. That died in the late 80s to early 90s perhaps.

The “global competitive” aspect would have occurred with or without the state legislature funding crunch. As the job market became global, the advantage of a prestige school would have increased and the smaller and less prestigious schools would have suffered. I think many small colleges and some number of private non-famous universities would have been in big trouble no matter what, esp as the “name” schools extended their reach by partnering and licensing their programs and famous names in creative ways.

What makes me go nuts on this - is that the schools now actively choose to make what they’re doing invisible, literally counting on taking advantage of a collusive closed market for an career necessity, and counting on applicant naïveté and desperation.

They deliberately market themselves to students without regard for whether the program is truly useful to the student or whether the student should take on the debt. That want it to appear to be all a “happy dance” about finding your path, when it’s really about you borrowing jacked-up amts of $ so that they can fund almost anything but undergrad edu. They deliberately do not help the student evaluate alternatives that might be best for the student. They deliberately conceal what they’re doing. They deliberately push tuition increases right up to the edge of where questions get asked by lawmakers, far beyind the costs of the program. They deliberately make it difficult to finish in four years because they infreqently schedule required upper-level courses - say, not every year and then often too few seats. They esp jack up the prices for half-time students (I’ve heard an additional $100/hour or more) so if that if you need to work, it just costs that much more., and you will find it even harder to get into the limited seats in upper-level required courses. They deliberately dwell on the famous profs and amazing achievements that an undergrad will never get anywhere near. It’s as slick and polished as a time-share pitch.

And they want your $. Your learning is fairly incidental to that, as long as their rep does not suffer.

And the uni’s collude with or secretly contract w textbook publishers who wish to charge far beyond anything reasonable for a book because the student has no choice but to get the book. They could actually oppose and stop the practice. They have the power, no question. They don’t act against the publishers, and don’t want the students to be informed of what the textbook companies are up to, even tho they appear to gain appear to nothing from the ongoing ripoff. Appear.

Once a student chooses a school (something most of the literate young will certainly need for a career), it’s a little taste if what working for the Pullman Company used to be, with company banks, towns, housing, schools, stores, and the the schools make it difficult and expensive to switch.

And what good is 120 hours w decent grades when your life fell apart or a child needed expensive care but you have as yet no degree? Next to nothing in many cases.

The schools could be honest. They could play a straight game. They could lay it all out and agitate, or help the students find alternatives, or help the student try to evaluate ROI and try to illuminate what it means to be in long-term debt - they could make it easier for serious part-timers. They could instigate a national debate about maintaining the US economy, science, and tech strengths without creating a generation that may well be pointed at “poor for life” without these kids ever even having gotten to their first adult job. The could block the textbook vultures.

Physicians are supposed to honor “first do no harm”. Once upon a time - within our memories - colleges and uni’s tried hard to honor that also.

With a few exceptions, no more.

I was so lucky to be completely free of all this. All I had to do was study and learn. I didn’t even have to bother with beaurocracy. No college or university jacked w me or my fellow students. They just gave us knowledge, encouragement, freeform discussion, and feedback with no hidden agenda.

The change from what once was on campus kills the desire for me when I imagine another going after some new corner of the world of knowledge at a degree-institution.

@f00l Someone I know was taking a class and one of the required texts was a specific most recently published version of the criminal code, and the cost was $$$. The instructor was checking to ensure they had the right version, with no credit if you didn’t. The argument was that students needed to use the up-to-date version, which sounds great on the surface, but: http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/

Yup, the government’s own, free, electronic version was not permissible. No, they had to have the expensive dead tree version, even with Wi-Fi available in class. It ain’t just a US problem.

@f00l

As the job market became global, the advantage of a prestige school would have increased and the smaller and less prestigious schools would have suffered.

Doubt it. Schools would have still been recognized for the quality of their graduates/programs. If states had allocated proper funding, schools wouldn’t need students to borrow ‘jacked-up amts of $’, would never consider colluding with publishers, would never have to enter the prestige/growth race. Cuz all that happens when they convert to a profit-driven, corporate business model - the whole university system mindset changes to Chasing The Cash & fighting for $$$. Education is just a front; a loss-leader.

Once I graduated, never mustered any ambition/desire to return to college. Unless I won the lotto: then I might try to enroll @ Art Center College of Design in Cali, just for the sheer joy & challenge of trying to create industrial art

@compunaut
I meant the bit you quoted to refer to both privately and publicly funded schools. And small, local-draw, little-known privately funded colleges or universities have suffered terribly. I think many of them are either gone or merged.

If the states had finded their own systems to spec, that’s a different story. Each campus, even the “where the hell is that?” remote ones, would have developed specialty areas and prob done ok. To a certain degree they have done this anyway, often with local corporate assistance. How many west TX schools really lay on the geology, mining, and oil industry cirruculum, along with a bit of ranching and agribusiness - and also get reasonable or substantial local biz investment thereby? TCU offered specialty ranching and oil industry programs in part because they could get weathly donors to pay for the startup, faculty, and buildings.

And the mass renaming - when I was young there was exactly one UT and one Tx A&M. The universities became “systems” for three main reasons - first, to organize administrative systems - second. to cooperate to a degree with resources and even more, to extend the cachet of the big name to smaller schools - and third, to make it politically possible to make funding for these newly renamed schools possible under the cover of the Permanent University Fund, since getting a school funded that way involves either a constitutional amendment or a 2/3 vote in the legislature.

The other systems: the UH system, UNT system, Texas Tech system, Texas State system all have their own endowment funds that aren’t nearly so nice, but are nothing to sneeze at.

Among that various school in the state that offer, say, electrical engineering programs, if you had a large pool of equivalently Texas-educated applications, is there any doubt which of the schools would have produced the grads you most wanted to talk with? And that presumes you have some knowledge of the schools. Now imagine interviewing applicants educated in Texas, at a distant location, for s corporation with no Texas presence? Is there any question which schools grads would get the interview? And if those applicants up against someone whose degree came from MIT or similar? How much “better” would an A&M grad have to be to beat someone from MIT? I would think the MIT grad would win every time.

The investment banks always hire their incoming trainees from a short list of premium schools, with a few extras thrown in for “diversity”. (Often those investment banking firms don’t give a damn about your major). Same with a number of other industries and prestige businesses. Try to get a good first level out of uni job at, say, GE. Most of those will come from a very very short list of schools. The ones who didn’t have these schools are almost there to “prove there’s opportunity for everyone”, tho those hires are also well-qualified. And doing well at those prestige-entry-level jobs at GE is taken (prob accurately) as some sort of universal measure of long-term professional quality.

Once you have a career track record, all that matters less. However, I do know of people being recruited to jump firms in their 50’s due to the big name on their undergrad degree, given that an equally successful and competent performer with no fancy degree had no chance of getting similar “glitz firm” or “prestige firm” offers. Some very successful businesses really like to have employees with sets of what could be called “old money preppy educational resumes”, so to speak. (Ie you went to the same uni’s attended by the very bright kids of the very successful). No one ever gets in trouble for hiring someone from Harvard. And those hires “fit in” at those companies where long-term career success for the hires into certain programs is almost a lock.

Every part of the economy is a squeeze now, education included. The stresses would have been terrible with or without the state funding going dry.

It’s an ugly biz. I don’t blame universities for struggling to survive, nor for struggling to get to or stay on top. I blame them for lying by implication and omission, for not fighting all the way to help their students avoid financial traps and terrible choices, for not being open and honest. For doing actual harm. For coasting on the ethical and social reputations they once deserved.

incidentally, the better the college or university, as long as their reputation is also decent, usually the less guilty they are - tho they still often way inflate tuition and don’t fight the textbook pricing. The better the school, the more they will help students in trouble stay in (big uni’s obviously do worse on this). And the more likely - by far - a degree is actually worth the money the students borrowed along the way to get it.

If I were 16 and understood all this, I honestly don’t know what path I would choose.

@Pixy This is one of the more depressing things I’ve read lately. There’s a guy in the US, Carl Malamud who’s focused on making the law (specifically standards enshrined into the law) available freely to the people- https://law.resource.org/. Might not help you now, but you could send him a note asking if he can do the same for the Canadian law in question.
There’s also RECAP, which helps makes US court decisions from PACER free to the public- https://free.law/recap/.

@dashcloud Actually, that’s the point. The entire thing IS freely available at the link I posted, but the course requirements didn’t allow it’s use. Anyone can find all Canadian federal laws and regulations online, for free. Searchable, no less. Stopping now, because we’ve derailed far enough.

@Pixy
It’s that kind of “necessary course requirement” that makes wonder exactly what the financial or political connection is between either the publisher and the school, or the publisher and the professor.

Kinda wish Nader would dive into this. He could get insider people to talk on the record.

Another way the schools drive and find their “non-profit” growth in status (i.e. growth of the school’s most valuable areas and prestige) is by hiring adjunct professors to do much of the undergrad teaching. It’s not unusual for adjunct professors who have no benefits and work full time to make under $20k a year.

Many have PhDs. Curiously, it can be hard for a PhD to get decent employment if they didn’t carefully career-track in academia, government, non-profit, or business from day one. Everything in the CV is supposed to show a constant prestige career progression.

Fail the progression and you prob can’t be considered for a decent academic or other PhD level job.

But because you have a PhD, no one wants to hire you for normal jobs. Having someone around who’s way overqualified can be scary for a company, and the company often suspects that employee of dual-loyalties or hidden agendas.

Many PhDs who don’t manage to “hit and fit” a proper prestige career path can be in trouble, and many wind up starting their own businesses (often just “ordinary” businesses) due to scarcity of other opportunity.

A interesting number of PhD’s-in-exile wind up as long-haul big rig drivers. You get solitude, relative freedom, decent bennies, and the possibility of decent income - and that industry doesn’t descriminate against the overeducated.

There is always an oversupply of PhDs at this time. Uni’s need cheap teaching labor. So they sharply limit expensive assistant, associate, and full professor positions, and hire adjunct professors with zero bennies, security, or prospects at pitiful $ to make up the difference. It’s another form of ugliness now far widespread, that was once much more rare.

@kidsandliz knows all about this. Way way more than me.

I know of people who planned the get PhDs in certain areas based on just looking at the faculty slot listings on the campus websites for, say, the 30 nearest schools. All those unfilled positions. So surely a great market for professors in that market or area, right?

Not unless the position is being actively advertised and recruited, no. For many of those “unfilled open positions”, the school has no intention of recruiting a full-time employee who might stay with the school and move ahead. It’s so much cheaper to fill the slot with adjunct professors who make terrible wages, on semester-by-semester or year-by-year contracts, paid terribly and without benefits.

@compunaut Some of what happened is the baby boomers. Colleges and universities expanded to handle the increased demand. Then that bubble more or less finished going through there and demand dropped. So schools started, more aggressively, to go after the part time and “adult” market to make up for that (adding online along the way, pushed into it partly by the for-profits making a killing back then and the state and non-profits saw that this was a way to shore up enrollment). Along lots of faculty got tenured. Hard to downsize when there is tenure so the problem becomes how to increase enrollment or cut costs or both. Hiring more poorly paid adjuncts is one common way schools address this problem.

@simssj
Yeah. A person possessing power and visibility and the ear of those with very much greater power, and who has a semi-religious agenda and zero higher brain activity, can still do a lot of damage.

@simssj Power rests with she who has the gold. If you control a budget you can support or kill things based on how you fund them. Or don’t. The dept of ed does a lot. If they dropped off the face of the earth and all their programs with it, no more PELL grants, federal student loans, disability services for kids in K-12, although those with an IEP might still be sort of in luck (except that there’d be no extra money to help pay for that and as it is many schools divert that money - legal to do - ad there are many, many ways to sabotage IEP’s. I won a state complaint over that with my kid)… and the list goes on and on.

@f00l re this generation: It’s a mixed bag.

Politics are fucked, but at least it’s no world war/cold war (yet anyway). Education is expensive, but we also have a world of information at our fingertips. Jobs are becoming more and more automated, but high skill jobs are opening up because someone has to run the automation and come up with improved processes.

Outsourcing sucks. Don’t really have a flip side to that besides that people in India need work too; of course that doesn’t make anyone feel much better when their job here disappears.

@PantHeist

I know. In some ways now is better. Less chance of nuclear winter I hope. Fingered crossed on that.

cancer treatments are better, assuming you can afford them. Lots of things are better. Tolerance is way way way better.

But once upon a time students were not required to look at the choice to attend college as an equivalent of signing your future earnings over to Satan. And you had time for serious intellectual equiry unrelated to a career.

Mixed bag. You deal with what you’re given. Just - the old rosy and idealistic auras that universities possessed in the eyes of their students and alumni - beware that. Even if you have a great time and do exceptionally well.

I talk of uni’s in the way I do because people of my era remember what they were.

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away now.

@f00l re: cancer treatments:

My grandfather was given six months to live when his colon ruptured and his colon cancer metastasized to his lungs. He enrolled in some trials suggested by his doctor and ended up living seven years past his given expiration date, and they were a good seven years.

I’m 28, and the future seems very bleak at times. But that’s the sort of thing that gives me hope. Maybe we’ll reach that Star Trek utopian future someday.

@f00l Wish I’d have had this to read many years ago. Every once in a while I think about where I would be now had I gone to MIT instead of where I did (decision made for the wrong reasons, although money was one). But I have a great life now so I don’t think about it very often.

Re: college in general, I believe that for most people it doesn’t matter nearly as much what your degree is in as that you have one at all. Almost like the degree is just proof to an employer that you can set a goal, work through a sometimes difficult set of challenges, and come out having achieved that goal on the other side. And for employers that think, there are other ways to demonstrate those abilities besides college if you are willing to be creative and dedicated.

@harveydanger
Yeah. We just keep going if we can.

That’s a universal condition of our kind going back as far as you wanna look. I don’t hate the present. Or uni’s.

But uni’s lie at least by omission. And they conceal data. On purpose. So that more will come and more will sign the loan papers.

They are not what they were 50 years ago. Not ethically.

@djslack
Yeah there will always be paths other than college. But notice how many jobs req college for no reason orther than that they can?

If you don’t have either that or a stunning reputation, your opportunities are limited.

@f00l Good point. Few employers think.

The other paths thing was almost an afterthought; a conclusion reached while writing the part of the paragraph that came before it. Many employers may not know the reason they’re looking for a degree, only that they are looking for one.

@djslack

Wanting a college degree in an applicant is a kind of guarantee that they can deal basic math, reading, writing, and have minimal computer skills at least. And are trainable. And that they had the tenacity (and financial means and life conditions) to see it through.

Now many many people have the basics without the degree. But if you say “degree required” in your job requirement, there is no shortage of potential applicants in the pool, and you just saved yourself a lot of time evaluating the extras.

It’s a winnowing requirement that has little to do with the job at hand.

I know of tons of jobs that don’t need people with degrees. Just people who are literate, intelligent, and decent and have a great work ethic. Often the people doing these jobs have no degrees, and do the jobs beautifully, but they are from an older generation. When that generation leaves the workplace, the next person to take that job will have to have a degree to get an interview to do exactly the same work.

Which means that next employee will prob have massive student loans.
But funny thing. Even tho that job now requires a degree, the pay for that job didn’t go up to a level that would help pay the student debt.

@djslack for undergrad, with a few exceptions (most for profits, schools with a reputation in the toilet…), it doesn’t really matter much. It matters more that you get good grades (so better you are one of the smarter students at a somewhat “lower reputation” school than at the bottom of the heap at a better school). If you want to work in Boston it will be easier to get a job there if your undergrad degree is near there than from a school in CA as most undergrad recruiters tend to do most of their recruiting locally or regionally. Good grades and good entrance exam scores will generally get you into better grad schools than poor grades and coming from a highly ranked school.

With graduate school though the calculus of this changes. There reputation often does matter more. If you can’t get into a nationally top school then aim for a regionally top school. Study for the entrance exams - those are achievement tests with a limited universe of information you need to know. If you know, for a fact, for the rest of your life, that all you need is the rubber stamp of the degree to get ahead then where you go isn’t as important. And of course at some point achievement in the work world becomes far more important than where you went to school.

@Barney m
I’ve got a little faith @legendornothing and those his age also.

@Barney @legendornothing
Thanks y’all. This has become one of my favorite rants. What a great community!

@legendornothing

That’s good. Hoped it would.
I have faith in you and your Mom. Hope you do too.