Then these universities need to be eliminated. The whole point of them is to actually teach people, and this kind of thing does a piss-poor job at at it. Why should someone pay *any* amount for something that's almost completely useless?
a) Students have demanded it, and some students do actually do well with it.
b) The "free market" has responded
c) It is a seemingly (read: on the surface) decent way of getting more students enrolled and retained while reducing costs. If you want to reduce costs (like you wax masturbatory about) in the university system because you are a bitter little moron with delusions of competence, that is a way to do it.
I am also referring to a real university, which usually offers a smattering of online courses. Generally in the non-arts humanities. It does not work well in math and science, but in a course like sociology, it does work rather well.
Yeah, I used to work one of those. It wasn't anything to write home about. Maybe things get better in year 3 and 4 though; I wouldn't know.
It is almost always better in the upper level courses. In the first year classes, you have several hundred freshmen to deal with. In the upper level courses, you have smaller class sizes, Graduate TAs who hold recitation sections, tutoring, and the professors A) like the work better because it is closer to their area of interest and B) the shit students (like you, who frustrate the ever living hell out of them) have mostly been weeded out.
I'm a rich CEO who had the personal skill and intellect to get out of the college scam early. Alyrium actually has a degree and still works in the university system.
And I know why universities do what they do, and how pissant little anti-academic morons like you have ruined the entire system... and I know this much better than you do, because I live it every motherfucking day.
You think I LIKE the fact that everyone goes to college? No. I have the onerous task of being the guy who weeds through the chaff to find the small amount of wheat tucked away in freshman biology courses. However, when little shits like you say things like "universities need to cut costs" and have no god damn conception of how much money it takes to actually run a university, then bitch and complain when tuition has to increase when our budget gets slashed every fucking year, I get pissed off. Do you think paying TAs is cheap? Sure we are cheap per unit, and work for peanuts, but there are a lot of us. The electricity bills, keeping a university police force armed, equipped, paying for building upkeep, administrative staff. All of it. A large university literally has a human population of a large town or small city, and a budget to match. UT Austin takes around two billion dollars just to run annually, and not have to lay off staff (So, campus becomes less safe, document processing becomes less efficient, trash does not get taken out, the grounds dont get kept up etc), lay off faculty (leading to even larger class sizes, decreasing the quality of education), fail to update infrastructure etc. If the state budget gets cut, tuition MUST go up to compensate. If grant funding gets cut, tuition MUST go up to compensate. If the endowments and trusts start to flag in the perilous economy, tuition MUST go up to compensate.
It's probably both. The online universities are no better much worse than penis enlargement and nigerian princes, but that doesn't mean the "real" universities - that use the same fucking classes for a good chunk of the time - are any better.
Actually, they ARE better. First off, you cannot get a degree that way. Second, professors are still physically available, as is tutoring and everything else.
And now * snaps on gloves and lubes them up with icy hot* for the pain.
a) Eliminate the first two years.
The first years are where there's the highest concentration of useless bullshit classes. The majority of the content is the kind of stuff you should have learned from high school anyway. Students shouldn't be forced to pay for things that don't benefit them simply as a gateway to get to the stuff that matters.
Cons: it will eat into the university's profits. Trivial bullshit classes are surely the cheapest ones to produce, but they still charge full price for them, so it probably makes budget excess for other areas that need it. This is actually a recurring problem with a few my cost-cutting ideas. Useless expenses for the students might serve as a wealth redistribution scheme to subsidize more expensive classes.
There are a number of problems with this. The first of course is that a liberal arts education is vitally important to produce functioning human beings, and it is not something anyone gets in high school anymore. You would think they do, but they dont. I see it first hand on a daily basis.
A liberal arts education is about far more than leaching money out of students, or teaching them shit they dont need. It gives them a certain well roundedness that helps make them, among other things, educated voters and decision makers. It helps them achieve fullness of life, and to realize their potential as persons. In short, it teaches students
how to think.
English composition: Helped me become a better writer and thinker, able to put the pen to anything I have ever needed to, and do so with the clarity needed to get my point across (even if I sometimes eschew those skills here)
Philosophy: If you have ever seen me discuss ethics or draw out a truth table or string together a syllogism, you will understand what I have gotten out of this.
Religious Studies: Know thy enemy, in my case. However, for other students, it gives them not only an academic appreciation for their own faith (gets them thinking) but also tends to blunt their tendency to be dismissive of others. You never come out of one of these classes as intolerant and ignorant of other faith traditions as you went in, and this applies even to me.
Psychology: Taking these classes helped me become socially functional, how to recognize when someone was trying to manipulate me (i took social psych and the psychology of influence), and how to recognize when I was succumbing to the biases inherent in human thinking.
Women's Studies: Combine the benefit of religious studies, psychology, and philosophy
History: Do you really want anyone without a decent grounding in this?
Without this, mostly taught in the first two years, I would not be the well-rounded person I am today. Neither would any other student. This of course says nothing of the introductory survey courses related to my major, which combined with all of the advanced stuff, is just not possible to fit into two god damn years. Would you like to see my CV, and tell me that I could have fit all the undergrad courses into two years?
b) Not focus on recruiting "top faculty" and instead settle for "adequate faculty".
Whenever someone mentions budget cuts, people reply with "zomfg we'll lose our best teachers!1!!11!!1" But, do you really need "the best" to do the fairly pedestrian task of teaching an undergraduate class?
Moreover, would two (or 1.5) average professors do a better job than one top professor anyway? They'd have more time to devote one-on-one to the students and I doubt any of the material really requires an exceptional mind or even a fantastic educator to go over. Fuck, do top faculty even teach their own classes anyway, or do they leave it to TAs? I don't really know - all my classes were taught by the actual people but I don't think any of them were top faculty anyway.
"Top faculty" seems to be more of an advertisement and research grant machine than something to forward quality. "we can't cut costs! Then we might not be able to pull in enough money to afford the expensive stuff we cut anymore!"
The answer is "All of the Above". Top faculty brings in grant money, which helps fund the university (because said universities take 40-50% off the top of any large grant), they teach the advanced classes (thus helping to train the next generation of say, scientists), and help give the university a reputation in a given subject material which helps bring in students interested in the field. They teach the graduate students etc. Universities do much more than teach undergraduates. Their other purpose is the
production of knowledge which, in addition to the long-term economic value, is ALSO intrinsically valuable. Without universities bringing in top faculty, all the cool shit you see in SLAM
wouldn't fucking happen.
c) Is it really necessary to maintain such outrageously huge grounds? Every college I've visited, from the local community college to the private engineering school up north, have had just very large plots of land. Is there a real need for all that? The high school manages to get by with a lot less land per student.
If they can consolidate with other facilities in the city, they might be able to save even more. Could they rent a theater, gym, or even lecture halls instead of building their own?
Just having buildings on public roads might cut costs, since then the city or whatever will take care of that maintenance. Perhaps one taller building on a main road instead of ten small buildings on scarcely used roads would be more efficient.
When I was in college, one class was in a huge auditorium like room... but the class had a whopping seven students. There might be gains to be had on more efficient class scheduling too, to make better use of the buildings they do have.
Yes, they do require it.
A) Room to expand.
B) Historical Constraint/Value (Universities tend to be old, and the buildings have historical value, as well as constraining
C) Creates a sense of community (Coming from undergrad at a sprawling campus, essentially a self-contained small town, and going to grad school at a smaller commuter campus is a big difference in terms of actually living there. It is something difficult to put a finger on, but suffice to say that the university community on the disjointed campus is more disjoined. It does not have the vibrant "16th century florence" [without the murder plots, of course] feel to it that university had in undergrad, and that definitely filters down into all aspects of life.)
D) Provides students with a place to hang. This is REALLY fucking important. Most students who fail out in their first two years do so because they go insane with freedom and do stupid shit. If you dont provide space for student groups, massive outdoor plays, carnivals etc, you end up having problems in a lot of areas. Students dont do as well academically, they get into more trouble etc.
E) There is also space for in-house tuition subsidized medical clinics, counseling services etc. Checkup? Uninsured? 15 bucks. Have an ear infection? Meds are subsidized and cost all of 15. Need an X ray because you fell off your bike? Cheeeaaap. No massive wait list for an appointment either. You get good basic preventative care for next to nothing, even without insurance. Hell, I accidentally swallowed nasty nasty tank water once (manually siphoning a tank that contained aquatic snakes because I didnt pull off the hose fast enough). They checked me for parasites for free.
d) I'd cut required on-campus housing. I'm sure the university makes a fucking killing off it, but forcing the students to pay for something so utterly unrelated to the actual education goal needlessly impacts their budget. If students can get a better deal on the private market, let them.
This would also help to reduce the size of the grounds, thus reducing security and maintenance costs to the university. On the other hand, it probably profits bringing back the same subsidizing con from (a). I say they should do that subsidizing from their primary mission though - use cheaper classes to pay for more expensive classes, not this side bullshit.
Actually, there are very real benefits to required on campus housing.
1) Students objectively do better academically
2) Again, it fosters a sense of community, which has a lot of intangible benefits
3) Exposure to diverse peoples
4) Easier to make friends (and let me tell you, the friends you make in university really do last a lifetime)
5) The ratio of price to value (in terms of things like security, proximity to campus etc) is actually better than on the private market. This depends on where you are of course, it was definitely the case at ASU.
The bottom line of the grounds thing is every college I've seen, big and small were more like isolated little villages than a part of the larger village/city.
Having experienced both environments, it is MUCH better that way.
They have their own roads, their own housing, their own security, their own parks and recreation, their own food providers, even their own duplicated high school - the first two years. Is any of that really necessary to provide higher education?
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Yes.
Or perhaps rent their facilities out when they don't have anything scheduled for them during a time slot?
They do that, actually.
Aye, this does help. I remember talking to a classmate's father the year before we left for college. Said classmate was set on going to the private engineering school, Clarkson University. I considered going there myself, but ran away quickly once they sent me the letter detailing their outrageous fees!
Behold! The free market operating on universities with no state funding!
sorry i must have missed when you and aly posted balance sheets and cost analyseses
http://www.utexas.edu/business/budget/n ... index.html
Why? It's not like the knowledge you have would magically disappear.
(Or is higher education actually about that piece of paper alone, and the actual education part of it barely has any relevance in the real world? If so, that's really fucked up.)
It wouldn't suddenly flood the market with new graduates either. They'd still have to do the hard part, just like the existing degree holders.
No fuckstick.
A) no one goes in with the
a priori knowledge to skip the first two years
B) You cannot fit everything into two years unless the quality of the education takes a massive hit
C) Knowledge requires maturity and discipline in order to apply properly and obtain. This is not something most people have at 18, or 20. There is a reason graduate schools dont usually look at the first two years.
D) A lot of students dont know what they want to do going in (only rare exceptions like me know what they want to be when they are three, and yes, I did. Ask my mom). The first two years are really good for figuring that out
E) Professional programs really do require a few years of preliminary work to make sure someone is cut out to even try them. Nursing, Engineering, Architecture etc.
Not necessarily self-direct: they have high school for this. The basics should have been already covered.
But they're not. Not to the level required to move on to more advanced studies (or even to pass the equivalent college courses). If they were, people would not flunk out of the first two years at the prodigious rate that they do.
If high school isn't already giving typical students the kind of basic algebra, philosophy, etc. that college starts off with, the solution isn't to add yet more years of expense to the individual. It's to fix the high school system.
Not going to happen. Also, unless you have extraordinary teachers, yeah, the quality of education really is better in university than high school. Even a TA, if they teach a basic class,
knows more about the subject material than a typical high school teacher does, can and will cover it in more depth, and does not have to play social worker.
Oh, and we dont have to teach to a standardized test.
That's absurd. They can't all have the best teachers. Granted, all professors probably have advanced degrees, so maybe they are all "the best" compared with the general population.
Top few percentile. In everything.
There are also institutional specialties. My department for example is REALLY good in herpetology and genomics. ASU was disgustingly good in behavioral ecology evolutionary biology/genetics.
But, that's not what "top faculty" is comparing against. Top faculty is surely looking at the best of college faculty... meaning there's professors who aren't as good, but clearly still good enough to be a professor. They must take less money too, since it's not a question of filling the position, it's a question of filling it with top men
Not all are top, no. However, they do try to recruit the best minds, and said best minds may or may not mature into top academics.
(I wonder: where would those top faculty go anyway? To another university? If they all were cutting costs, that option would disappear. Are they concerned about losing them to private companies?)
No. Not outside of engineering anyway. In professional programs, faculty either tend to be retire professionals, or adjunct faculty, with only the hard core academics (the people who say, try to build a new sort of neuro-prosthetic) being full time faculty and top in their fields.
No... outside those fields, the capacity to produce knowledge will just disappear unless universities recruit them. Plain and simple. Private companies do not hire amphibian ecologists on a full time basis. Original research is just not done in the private sector anymore, outside of places like the Craig Venter institute. Even the pharmaceutical industry does not actually do their own drug development anymore, because it is too high risk, and too long term. They leave the university biochemists to do that, and then buy the patents.
Anyway, are these cheaper college professors really so much worse that hiring them is going to hurt more than the savings can bring?
Yes. It will do untold damage to the values of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment that brought us the entire academic tradition. The cross-national endeavor of producing knowledge to better the condition of all mankind would be stabbed in the fucking kidney.
There's a possible solution though: specialize (to some extent at least) at the high school level, something more like they do in Germany.
That would be ideal, but wont happen.
Prove it. (this brings back to what I said about about competing for "top faculty". If the private companies aren't doing any research, where would these researchers go if the university decided to give them a pay cut?)
Look through a peer reviewed journal in physics. The authors are listed as are their affiliations. You will be hard pressed to find a paper written by a corporate scientist.
Corporate entities still do applied research (Read: New missiles, developing new vehicle technology etc), but the basic research that gives you all the Cool Shit you see in SLAM... nope.
Besides, if research can't find funding without tricking stupid kids into paying for it while telling them it's for their education so they can get a job, maybe it shouldn't be funded.
And this proves you dont know what the fuck you are talking about.
Tuition, outside small internal grants, does not pay for basic research. Most comes from the federal government (EPA, NSF, NIH, DOT, DOD, DOE etc), and university pays the researcher. Those expenditures actually make up a tiny fraction out of the hundreds of millions or billions of a university operating budget, and the return for the university is fantastic. Why? Because if that Biochemist finds a new drug, guess who gets a huge slice when he sells the patent? The university. Guess who gets 40-50% off the top of the grants? The university. In the end, said top faculty and grant funding they bring in, are net positives for the university operating budget. Helps keep tuition LOWER than it would otherwise be.
Oh, and then there is the fact that basic research is of course high risk, long term investment. The free market works poorly in those situations.
Yeah, I love research as much as the next guy, but if the only way it can exist is by fooling* young, stupid kids into staggering debt to pay for it, maybe it really needs to be reconsidered.
A) it does nothing of the source
B) tell that to me the next time you need anti-biotics, or heaven forbid, need to have your left leg replaced after you get run over crossing the street.
* When you went to college, did you get literature explaining that no, your money isn't being spent on your education, it's being spent on a random research project that we could cut and pass the savings on to you... but don't want to? I don't remember seeing a "research fee" when I had those bills.
No. You did not. Why? Because the researchers in effect pay the university for the research space through the overhead fees from grants. Or, did you not pay attention in my prior post when I explained how much the university takes off the top from those?
I await your proof that it is. I am not going to argue for the abolishment of a whole line of work just because it "may" turn out to be murder and slavery, especially not if this is unsupported by evidence or common sense. 
