Most of the anti-college rhetoric originates from the US, I think, because of the high cost. In Canada, where undergraduate tuition at some of our best universities is below $10k/year (usually much lower), "going to college" is far easier to rationalize.
EDIT: I didn't mean to be all smug about it. The cost of going to university is different in different countries, and if it's too expensive where you're at, maybe going as an exchange student is a viable alternative? That's the only big regret I have, never having done that.
Firstly, it does, in Scandinavia just like everywhere else. Secondly, it does for a reason. Not just because they can charge (though obviously...), or that teachers/professors would like to eat something every once in a while, but also because getting the results is quite expensive. Take a look at the universities rankings[1] -- how many schools in the top ten aren't British or American?
Before we get all smug about our educational systems largely free of exorbitant fees, arbitrary admissions, and racists nonsense like affirmative action (well, largely), we should take a look at the results Americans are getting. It's not all corruption and waste.
Most "top" universities receive their ranking for the quality of the research they produce, not quality of undergraduate education. There is likely a decent correlation between research output and undergraduate education, which one can determine by looking at schools that have some of the highest achieving undergrads (such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford) and noting that these schools also are major research centers. Note there are most certainly exceptions to this, ie schools without a ton of research output but with great education for undergrads (I'm thinking of Reed College here, but no evidence/just my perception) or universities that don't do much with undergrads but are major research centers.
However, I'd mostly like to address the fallacy of attributing the high international rankings of American universities to the high undergraduate tuition. At Caltech, I've heard many undergrads say that all undergrad tution is about 5% of Caltech's budget, with a lot of the rest coming from various research grants. At schools with less of a research focus and more undergrads, undergrad tuition might make 30% of the budget. I can't find the blog post at the moment, but there was a discussion a few years ago about what would happen if MIT gave a full scholarship to all attending undergrads, and the conclusion was that it would hurt (but not cripple) MIT financially, but appeared possible.
Those same universities have selection criteria which predict success after college independent of the college attended. So it's not like they are masterfully teaching anything; rather, it seems very much like they are simply rebranding the best students.
To the extent that they also teach students more and better, this is actually damaging socially because it sucks secondary educational capital into a few locations. Lower end schools could do more and better if they housed many more bright and ambitious students. But if they're all going to a handful of schools, they're not improving the social networks at Random State.
Although elite universities might not "masterfully teach", the students at these universities still learn more than students at a lot of universities simply because the classes are more difficult (these are generalizations, not the rule). If classes are more difficult/cover more content but aren't taught well enough/not all content covered, then highly ambitious students just end up teaching themselves a lot of the curriculum, but they still know the material of their classes by the end. Essentially, even though the teaching might not be better, I believe an average MIT student studying X comes out more knowledgeable than student from [[ state school ]].
And its an interesting thought to distribute top students. Assuming a fixed quantity of "bright and ambitious" students, wouldn't sending more of them to lower end schools weaken the social networks formed at elite schools and destroy something unique about American education system?
Please. There are thousands of these rankings. They all show different results and most of them are produced by Americans in the first place.
To start with how do you qualify a college good or bad? Nobel prize winners, number of sharks graduated, number of Forbes 100 people, scientific articles published?
Let all of these alone I just graduated from an high school outside USA and am accepted to those top schools along with my classmates. Everybody knows that US applications are about how good you can memorize SAT words and how well you can look on the paper. I know people who faked hundreds of projects and got into these top schools. Believe me their number far exceeds the number of people who actually deserve to be there.
A school with abundant resources attracts high profile customers rather than actual students.
Everybody knows that US applications are about how good you can memorize SAT words and how well you can look on the paper.
That's what it looks like from outside the USA. For US students, the SAT barely matters at all. Top criteria at elite schools are 1. race (don't be Asian-American), 2. sports (especially elite sports like crew), 3. contacts, recommenders, networking, 4. high grades from a well-known high school, 5. extracurricular activities, 6. objective tests.
Try that gauntlet and you'll be pining for tests of SAT words.
For the record: going to university is free in Sweden (and probably the rest of Scandinavia) for the individual, which is the relevant metric here. Obviously someone has to pay, but the cost is not part of the equation when you're making the decision (other than the alternative cost for not working).
I didn't say that. Listen, if you want me to describe to you how biased these rankings are in favor of Western institutions, I'd be glad to do so. For example, a common metric is number of publications, for which the accepted journals are almost entirely Western (or US-based). And then you have scores that are based partially on (perceived) reputation, for which American schools will always come first. For the QS World University Rankings, this accounts for 40% of their final score.
The thing is though, private education systems has shown to produce cost explosion as education is a needed thing and no one is controlling the costs. State financed education has a much better cost control. Like they don't build insanely expensive stadiums or put a grand piano in the cafeteria (seen this at a US university).
The problem with that is that it sets a precedent , basically saying "If you are poor , you better be a genius or you will have no qualifications and will work in mcdonalds"
How ironic, apparently in scandinavia they must not teach basic algebra, basic accounting, and basic tax law.
There is no free lunch in the world, you indeed pay for university.
The statement you make is so ironic because you are displaying an incredible amount of ignorance in basic math and taxes, thereby discrediting the scandinavian university system you are here defending!!
I'm sitting here cracking up and can't stop laughing at your comment.
Welcome to America! Cash is king. My art school degree when said and done will cost somewhere near $72,000. That is just tuition. I can't wait to see what the "open" education platforms of the future bring.
As much as people crap on art school an art degree can at least pay for itself as long as your willing to work for other, and not, say, make drawings of anime all day. Most of the anti-college rhetoric comes from 1 simple things.
Cost of degree > Worth of degree.
$200,000 for a degree which only nets a $35,000/yr job is starting to seem like a bad deal.
That's if you value the degree in terms of the salary you can garner after graduating, or believe that money is everything. There are simply some things that you cannot put a price on. College is not for everyone, but for many it can be an eye-opening experience that enriches lives in deep ways.
Re: There are simply some things that you cannot put a price on.
Debt that will follow you through bankruptcy is not one of
them. I know of people who took exactly that attitude about college and it destroyed their lives.
If you are not paying for college, or not paying much, it is true that it can be a fun 4 years and does not need to be considered a financial decisions. But when you are collecting more debt than an average mortgage you should really consider if the house you are buying is worth it.
If someone is looking for a safe financial investment that provides guaranteed returns on the dollar, college isn't likely to rank high on that list. We seem to agree on that. I said that college isn't for everyone. My point was that equating worth or value directly to a dollar value return is probably a bad way to look at an education. Many people can't afford a quality education, and it's an injustice. But how much money you can earn because of your degree is only one facet to weighing the benefits of an education. And, to me, it's a poor method of valuation.
Well first of all I do not equate education necessarily with college, education is a process and college is a place where that may or may not happen. My main point is that assuming large levels of debt should be approached as a business/investment decision, as should anything with such a large down side. And even if you are college material having $200,000 in debt and a degree in something that gets you a $35,000/year job is just not a reasonable thing to do. And with a debt/salary load like above college will be the best 4 years of your life, loan payments will see that it is so in the best case.
I re-read your comment, and I think that where we agree is that an education doesn't have to mean college. Also, a degree as a piece of paper is not really worth anything -- I was thinking of the experience of diving into learning, and the benefits of being in an academic environment that can't be reduced to a dollar value (at least not easily).
And who's fault is this for choosing to go to a private college? There are plenty of community colleges that are a viable alternative, quit bitching when their are plenty of cheaper alternatives available.
I'm in Brazil, where the best universities are public and free. I dropped out for very similar reasons of why us colleges are criticized. The problem is time is money, and even the best universities are extremely time-inefficient. I learned much more on the internet and coding by myself than I did on college. But most importantly, I learned much faster. College has way too much overhead, because it has to cater to all kind of people. But specially in software, theres just to much different paths to choose. And you probably don't even know where to go at the beginning. Here, it's very common that after you graduate, your employer will tell you, you know nothing, and only now you'll finally learn how things really work. Then why did I go to college then? It's just not efficient.
So as I see it. It's more efficient use of your time to start working by yourself then seek to learn exactly what you need to get the job done.
Others say what matters about college is not education. But networking and proving you can get things done. But you can also get those more efficiently somewhere else. Hackatons and linking to your code on github are much more efficient at these.
Overall, the main anti-college argument is simply that there are more cost and time efficient means to get the same that college gets you. If after considering that you still want to go to college. Then be happy and do it, you'll still get there, it will only cost you more time and money.
This about sums it up for me. I work full time (I'm 25), so it's going to be a royal pain in the ass to finish off my degree part time. Four full years of college is just insane. If I could just transfer my credits over to a half decent accelerated CS program ...
I feel like the programming field should accommodate better, more time efficient education. We're a different breed of workers, as we are constantly required to learn, and the best learning happens while doing actual work.
Going to college in the us doesn't really cost all that much unless you want it to. For example, I know many people (including myself) that completed our undergrad and masters for around $30k. Add in our pell grants and you can subtract something like half of that.
All of my peer group have fulfilling careers and none of us had any debt after about two or three years. And all of us work positions with people who did pay a lot for school and who are still paying off their debt. In other words going to hum drum community college and state school put us in precisely the same employment positions as people who paid 4 to 5 times as much.
"In other words going to hum drum community college and state school put us in precisely the same employment positions as people who paid 4 to 5 times as much."
It's no doubt more expensive today, the school budgets are different, tuition is different, grants are less available. But it's still possible to go from high school to an advanced degree for the price of a low-end family sedan instead of a Porsche.
Using today's dollars here's what my education would cost today (minus books because I have no way of knowing what the cost of used books for all of the courses would be plus most courses honestly don't use the books and aren't needed).
Community college: 2 years, A.S. degree (okay, 2 A.S. degrees, but that's not the point). 60 credits. ~$140 per credit in my area. Total: $8400.
That's the first two years of the undergrad down.
Transfer to local state college that possesses an agreement with the local community college to transfer the A.S. and place the student as a junior.
Current tuition around $9k per year. So $18k to finish up the undergrad.
Total undergrad tuition from the local state school $26,500.
Add $18k for the grad program. $44,500.
Now subtract Pell grants (only available for the undegrad): $5500 per year or $22000 for the undergrad. (it was I believe $6500 when I went so there's that).
Final tuition $22500 in 2012 dollars.
Which isn't too bad, only $7500 more than what I paid in 2001.
Of course there's books and such, but like I said usually you can get them used, don't need them at all, and can return them after the semester and get some of the money back. I'm also not counting housing, food, other misc expenses, which is a significant expense for many students. One school I looked at charges ~$20k for housing and meal plan.
By comparison, MIT is $20,885 per term. In other words, even before Pell grants, my entire program, from High School to Graduate Degree costs around what one year costs there.
Tufts university, another well regarded school, run $41,998 per year.
Sidenote: it's interesting how hard it is to find tuition and rates at expensive schools. I picked MIT and Tufts because they were relatively forthcoming about it (even if the information was buried someplace). Other schools play fun games by showing per credit rates, and leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how many credits their major requires, then do the math to figure out their tuition. Or they show per credit rates after financial aid for a family of the median income or other such nonsense. My favorite is where they'll list their tuition, and then not make it clear if it's per semester or per year. Stanford's tuition rates are almost absurdly cryptic (when the tuition rates page is even up) -- for the record it's $40,050 per year, add in other expenses and it's $52,341 per year or around $200k for an undergraduate degree, 10 times my program which gets you a graduate degree.
It's also very telling when most non-state schools I look at feature "financial aid" on the front page of their site. They know their tuition is too high.
Second sidenote: Tufts recommends $800 per year for textbooks if anybody wants to figure that in.
The reason why it's virtually impossible to get tuition & prices at expensive schools is because it's socialist. "From each according to ability, to each according to need." Tuition at MIT is free if you (or your parents) make under $100K/year. Same with Stanford.
The price you pay for any income range between there and full price depends upon this incredibly convoluted form, the FAFSA, that basically involves listing every asset and income source available to you, and then the college quoting a price back to you, which will be some combination of parental contribution, work/study, and loans, with the remainder made up by grants from the college.
Sticker price at Amherst when I went was just over $40K/year, including room & board. My parents actually paid about $12K/year, I think, with another couple thousand in loans for me.
Right. And I think this is a whole different and also entirely interesting topic. I'm constantly surprised how many families don't simply "cut loose" their 18 year old so that they have virtually no income when filling out their FAFSA paperwork. It almost guarantees favorable student aid.
More importantly, when private universities do post their tuition, they don't post them as "max tuition pending review of financial status", but increasingly they are as no reasonable person will pay something closing in on a quarter million dollars for an undergraduate degree (I'm thinking tuition, books, supplies, food, housing, the whole shebang) that some schools these days are commanding.
And I think it's because the universities spend quite a bit of effort trying to figure out how to shift the tuition to a deferment rather than a waiver or reduction. So we get a "tuition" link right next to the "financial aid" link and a wink and nod from the school because surely everybody knows those rates are negotiable.
I think I return to my main point which is that a decent undergrad education in the U.S. doesn't really have to cost $100k-$250k no matter the school one attends. However, the ridiculous rates private schools post doesn't help things. Their actual average tuition rate is likely much much lower - and the full price is a "penalty rate" for coming from money.
What's troubling is how a relatively simple breakdown like I provided earlier up this thread or yours seems to be a great mystery.
Besides that, at least in the US, most "computer science" degrees don't seem to create an analog experience to classic engineering diciplines. They don't focus on how to design and build software systems per se, but in the science behind computing. And the degrees that try to focus on the "engineering" are, or are regarded as, watered-down second-class degrees with less prestige (like information systems managment and software engineering).
I think part of it is direct cost and part is opportunity cost, but I think the actual reasons are more subtle..
For two generations, we've been fed the line that a "college education leads to success" while at the same time we've entered a world where the rate of innovation - not just in tech - is moving much faster than the curricula can adapt.
As a result, you end up with professors who have been out of their industry and have skills that are (likely) eroding. At the same time, they're teaching concepts that are being replaced and expanded upon. It's a dangerous combination.
At the same time, throw in the degrees that have sole purpose of training a professor to teach the same classes. At some point, the supply of these people will outpace the demand and whole departments are going to suffer.
Then throw in people who probably would have (or should have?) chosen a different path but ended up going to college to have "success." Either they succeed on their own (yea!), the have grade inflation or gimme classes devaluing the degree, or they fail.
If they fail, we end up with some who might have been GREAT at Job X but where pressured into going for Job Y and suffered failure.. so they're unlikely to reach either.
The "value" of an education is primarily two things at this point:
- learning how to learn -> if this doesn't happen until college, ponder what's going on the previous 12 years..
- the relationships & associations with like-minded individuals... if you can find them.
Some of our best 'Colleges' are only $3-5k/year in tuition. I went to a College myself. It taught me a lot, but now I find myself wanting more.
I think the decision should be based more on the experiences the person is looking for, instead of money. Especially in Canada, where getting a student loan isn't really a daunting task.
>Most of the anti-college rhetoric originates from the US, I think, because of the high cost.
Some of it is just cultural--I received a heavy dose of the anti-college mindset 30 years ago (from relatives while growing up in the southern US) when it was still pretty cheap.
High cost is not just tuition. It's also the time and energy required. When you look at it as opportunity cost, especially during the prime of your life, it might make more sense to spend it elsewhere, such as on the job or vocational/trade school.
This is true. Undergraduate education in Canada is well under $10k/year. Plus, thanks to favourable tax law, a large proportion of the costs are recouped in your first year of employment after graduating.
Going to school in most countries is a no-brainer.
I think this is absolutely correct. I'm a US college dropout who started taking classes again in 2001 or 2002 and have basically been constantly in some class for something (taking classes on the side) ever since.
if you're saying education isn't worth the time or money, I disagree, but if you're saying the US higher education system is so broken it's not even worth considering, I agree.
