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Education The Almighty Buck United States

'US College Education Is Nearer To Collapsing Than It Appears' (twitter.com) 448

Posted by BeauHD from the unsustainable-practices dept.
According to OpenAI CEO and former president of Y Combinator, Sam Altman, college education in the U.S. "is nearer to collapsing than it appears." He writes in a Twitter thread: Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense. Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test.

It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Stopping standardized tests -- which are imperfect and correlated with socioeconomic status -- seems to be bad. Other items like the personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. I'm all for looking at test scores in context, but dropping entirely denies opportunity. (I wonder if this is correlated to the earthquake coming when colleges can no longer discriminate against Asian-American students.)

Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning. (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... Although I understand the spirit and obviously I am privileged, I consulted with friends from different backgrounds and then declined: what kind of message does that send to listeners?) The list could go on for a long time, but the point is: What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it.
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'US College Education Is Nearer To Collapsing Than It Appears' More

'US College Education Is Nearer To Collapsing Than It Appears'

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  • What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Monday March 21, 2022 @11:36PM (#62378873)

    It's already a steam pile of wreckage, and has been for decades. And I'm not even talking about the debt, just the quality of the education. Anybody who has attended a western European university knows this. Some well know Ivy League institutions deliver a fine education of course, but most lesser-known Unis are just appalling.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by slazzy ( 864185 )
      Collapse will happen when there aren't enough students to pay the bills, at least that's what I took from it.

      • A college education is a bigger financial benefit than ever before. This is even true for liberal arts, but doubly so for engineering and CS.

        The median debt load for those that use loans is $30k. That is not excessive and the payments are far below the income differential with those who didn't go to college.

      • Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @08:05AM (#62379609)

        Collapse will happen when there aren't enough students to pay the bills, at least that's what I took from it.

        That's why they need college debt forgiveness. They want to keep the pipeline of money flowing so they can keep charging exorbitant tuition and fees.

        We need to get out of the college financing business. The costs will drop when the "free money" ends

        • That's why they need college debt forgiveness.

          Student loan debt should be dismissible through bankruptcy, as it once was. Put the risk back into the equation and the deluge of money will cease. As it should.

          But don't call it "Forgiveness" because that's a big "Fuck You" to everyone who paid off their debt.

          • The problem is the federal government loans money with wild abandon (I'd refer to inebriated sailors, but it would reflect badly on the sailors) for anything a student wants to study - that is insane.

            Limit loans to desired/needed professions, not 'anything' and require students to front some money for the first years tuition - if you want to borrow $30-75K from me, it's reasonable to ask them to come to the deal with something - couple grand?

            And students should not be borrowing federal money to pay for reme

    • Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Informative)

      by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:27AM (#62378963)
      You're absolutely wrong in engineering. I have direct knowledge about this.

      Pick a random, ACCREDITED engineering program in some local, po-dunk regional university

      Pick a top-10 engineering program that charged 7 times the tuition.

      The content in the classes will be nearly EXACTLY the same. I've seen this first-hand. As in, I've been at a table with 2 piles of homework assignments - one pile from a barely-known school and one from the same class at a VERY famous one. Identical content. The accreditation process forces that.

      The higher-ranked school will provide things the lower school does not. But the classroom education? Nearly identical. At least in engineering. The quality of engineering education in US universities is actually a really deep pool.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I have a masters in engineering from a "good" school (not Ivy League, but I don't understand why that would matter). 200k in debt, but I make about 200k per year. I am a good engineer, but honestly looking back at how I learned what I learned I don't see why I couldn't have just used something like Khan Academy if they had advanced engineering courses. Very little was learned in the lab. With this in mind I don't see how the system is sustainable. The 80's era loan backing will eventually lead to competitor

        • Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4)

          by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @05:21AM (#62379337)

          "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library".

          - Frank Zappa

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by jwhyche ( 6192 )

            "If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library". - Frank Zappa

            That is a good one. I was thinking of that one while reading these comments.

            "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."

            - Mark Twan

      • I agree with this.

        I attended a state land grant university.

        In my career, I have worked with people from Harvard, Yale, MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford.

        Do they know stuff that I didn't learn?

        No, they don't.

        The education is about the same. The only thing they got was a better job network.

        • Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DamnOregonian ( 963763 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @04:41AM (#62379249)
          The education is, for sure.

          But they got more than the better job network.
          They also got a name on their degree that indicates they have some quantifiable percentage better chance at being good at their job than you.
          They don't need better courses for this. They just need a more selective admissions process. Which they have.

          • The name on the degree helps you get your foot in the door for your first interview.

            After that, it doesn't matter much.

            • You seem to be arguing that by filtering the input, the output cannot be affected.

              Now I'm questioning whether you even attended secondary school.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by dcw3 ( 649211 )

            As a retired engineering manager, I'd hired and worked with hundreds of engineers over the years, including many Ivy league grads. Rarely were any of them any more impressive, and occasionally we'd even get a dud, just like we would from regular state schools. Yes, the sheepskin they had often got them into an interview with us, but I've also hired folks with zero college that did better. The "more selective admissions process" is a pile of cow shit these days.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by narcc ( 412956 )

        Identical content. The accreditation process forces that.

        That's simply not true. While it's possible that subject matter experts will review curriculum as part of the accreditation process, they will never prescribe content.

        See, accreditation is mostly about the long-term stability of the institution, which means boring things like finances and policies and procedures. Accrediting bodies are far more concerned about having appropriately qualified faculty than they are about the details of any particular course, for obvious reasons.

    • Re:What do you mean "about to collapse" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Darinbob ( 1142669 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @01:51AM (#62379081)

      I await the day when my doctor has skipped college and I see on the desk a copy of "learn brain surgery in 21 days".

      • I await the day when my doctor has skipped college and I see on the desk a copy of "learn brain surgery in 21 days".

        Or maybe he'll just stay in a Holiday Inn Express [youtube.com] the night before ...

      • Idiocracy is coming, if not already here.

        It may not have reached your doctor yet, but in all other jobs it's common to hire unskilled people, hand them a three-ring-binder and require them to follow The Process, valuing uniformity of the results over the experience of anyone who actually would know his trade.

    • Maybe you should have gone to a better university. Mine was fine (and also not Ivy League, thank god).

    • just the quality of the education. Anybody who has attended a western European university knows this.

      I taught at a Western European university for a while, and I say you're an idiot and anyone who doesn't have a massive axe to grind knows this.

  • You don't want to pay taxes to have workers trained.

    College was always expensive. We used to heavily subsidize it with state and federal subsidies. Starting in the '80s we began to cut those subsidies and in the 90s we began to slash them. I was in college at the time the cuts began and were planned and laid out. I remember the local college newspaper talking about how the price of college would skyrocket.

    As for college being a bad deal? That's nonsense. First and foremost it cost about 200k to get

    • It's also worth pointing the finger at administrative bloat and luxurious facilities.

      • Administrative salaries and the number of administrative employees hasn't budged. You're being told that administrative bloat is the problem so that they can get away with cutting subsidies. It's a trick don't fall for it. They're playing you.

    • I don't think Altman is trying to BS, he's just ignorant.

      He's spent years in the really weird atypical world of west coast software startups where twenty somethings plug together a few toolkits, go viral, and end up with a billion dollar company.

      For those folks, a traditional university degree maybe doesn't make sense.

      But most of the real world doesn't work like that.

      • And anyone who isn't rocking a college degree ends up in a dead end job because they get filtered out by companies automatic HR systems that just want to hire cheap labor that's already trained.

        Everybody focuses on the lottery winners and not all the people who blew their last five bucks on a lottery ticket. You'd be much better off putting yourself in a position where you're not down to five bucks and hoping you win the lottery.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      College was never as expensive as it is today. Much of this comes from massive expansion of administrative aspects of the college, not the teaching staff. You're getting an inferior product that costs more today. The only thing that is propping the bubble is that accreditation in them is still more or less universally recognized by the companies.

      But as "garbage in, garbage out" issue grows into size that can no longer be ignored, you are starting to see that which you see in the OP. More and more companies

    • What are you talking about? $200k in debt for someone making $35k a year and it won't take long to recover the cost? People making $35k a year cannot afford the monthly payments on a $200k loan. It is way beyond their spending ability to rent an apartment, pay utilities, pay for groceries, make car payments, make car insurance payments, pay for gas, etc and still have anywhere near enough left to cover the $1400 a month student loan payments. You've literally trapped them in a spiraling student loan hell th
      • The way I read it, GP was suggesting that due to the college degree, the graduate would be making $35k *more* a year, thus affording to pay off the $200k debt in a more timely manner (take taxes out... still 10+ years with interest? yikes). I would also extrapolate that as having a "productive degree at a productive time", versus simply having a college degree. Plenty of history and journalism grads would like a word.

  • tech / trade schools got roped into the degrees systems and an lot of them got bloated to fit into it. Also the unlimited student loans removed an lot risk from the schools as well. As the banks don't give an dam if you can't pay back your loans as it was very hard to get rid of the debt.

    In places like germany they have good trade schools and they are not 2-4 years of pure classroom. No it's classroom and on the job PAID work.

    But the USA needs to cut the cost of college education.
    Back in the 70's / 80's you

  • It's would be incredibly profitable.

    • Yeah, I don't want to waste time on the article but - did the guy make the announcement about his new start-up "to reinvent education" right there in the story, or is he planning on waiting a few more weeks so (in his mind, anyway) it's not as obvious?

    • It's only incredibly profitable because of the partial government underwriting of college loans and their enforced repayment with no significant possibility of discharging through bankruptcy. If college loans were considered dischargeable unsecured debt as they damn well should be, the amount of loans approved for degrees outside of STEM and MBAs would drop through the fucking floor.

  • Oh god another Stanford dropout (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hdyoung ( 5182939 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:19AM (#62378947)
    telling everyone that they totally don't need to go to college, just like them. This guy's got an IQ that puts him in the top 0.001% of the population. Plus, he took massive risks and they paid off. So clearly, everyone can totally do what he did. Who needs college?

    Standard billionaire delusion. No. Not everyone can do what this guy did. Very few people have this guy's abilities, but he also got obscenely lucky. For every 10,000 people like him, only one gets lucky enough to be that successful. So, THIS IS NOT A MODEL FOR SUCCESS. This is what's called an OUTLIER. Trying to emulate this guy is like taking your shot at pro basketball. 10 million people who all think they can get one of the 25 available slots. There's going to be a lot of bitter, disappointed people.

    College education has proven so useless that there's been a wave of companies, established by dropouts, run by dropouts, that hire dropouts. And these companies are beating those old-school, behind-the-times companies that hire people with worthless formal qualifications and degrees. What? Companies like that are actually super rare? The successful ones tend to hire actual engineers with actual qualifications? Wonder what that could mean....

    There are plenty of highly competent people with absolutely zero formal eduction. But they are OUTLIERS. At least in STEM.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Indeed. I've met people who became good programmers without going to college. There are not many of them. Most of the people who go to code camps did it after getting a degree in a different subject.

      Getting good at programming without college is about as easy as getting good at programming in college, but you have to be self-motivated.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I sometimes wonder if it's ego, if they really think that everything fortunate that happened to them is because they made it happen. Or if it's malice, if they want everyone else to make bad decisions based on one in a million chances so that they have a steady stream of desperate consumers and workers.

  • Current savings (Score:3)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:28AM (#62378967)

    My child just turned six years old. He had $36,000 in his 529 account, and we currently save $10K/year in this account.

    It may or may not get used for college, or trade school, or even hookers & blow. College/University in its present form may or may not exist by the time he comes of age. But this money will provide options when he turns 18 or 19, when there would otherwise be a lot less options.

    The best thing you can do for your child is to provide options, rather than depending on someone else to do so.

    • >"The best thing you can do for your child is to provide options, rather than depending on someone else to do so."

      To expand on that more- the best thing one can do for one's child is to be a supportive, involved, caring, and encouraging parent. The lack of this (and especially from fathers) is what has caused the majority of problems for much of the population for generations.

      Poor economics isn't great for children and young adults, but poor "culture" is 100 times worse. But it seems most of society r

      • Re: Current savings (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MysteriousPreacher ( 702266 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @04:07AM (#62379215) Journal

        Yep. One need only look at rates of incarceration to see that people from broken families are massively over represented.

        Finish school
        Don't have kids before you're married and on a stable income.
        Don't have more kids than you can support.

        On average your kids will do far better than those who ignore those rules.It's not racism. It's a problem with dysfunctional subcultures. There are plenty of predominantly white subcultures driving self-destructive behaviours.

    • There's no good reason to put that much into a 529 account. If the child doesn't end up using it for approved expenses (most educational expenses), you pay a 10% penalty when the money comes out of the account. If you want to have money available to the child for other purposes, consider a standard IRA or a trust fund instead, or maybe even whole life insurance (which is generally yuck except for wealthy families).
  • You can get the job if you impress the interviewer, but will they promote you? In my entire career, I've reported to precisely 1 college dropout. Most in the leadership chain have masters degrees. The one exception is founders, like Mark Zuckerberg. Sorry, a college degree puts the odds more in your favor. I agree most degrees are useless...but for my kid, I'll be pushing him to go to college. I don't want him to be get a tech job purely based on merit and at age find no one will promote him.

    Pleas

  • Do you remember when the NYT declared 2012 the Year of the MOOC [nytimes.com] and UDacity founder Sebastian Thrun predicted that in 50 years, only 10 physical institutions of higher learning would exist?

    Well, within 5 years or less the UDacity vice president declared MOOCs to be "dead" and they'd transitioned to cruddy little nanodegrees for pay (hence eliminating the second "O" in MOOC).

    Up next was "adaptive learning" software which also goes roughly nowhere per this article [insidehighered.com].

    This cycle just repeats forever. There's a lo

  • Twitter is a source? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @12:53AM (#62379013)
    That's like citing "Some guy said this in a bar" and expecting to be taken seriously.
    • He played his whole hand when he said "Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test." That assumption is so big, it's got a gravity well.
  • They are nothing but leftist indoctrination centers at this point.

  • Broken Economics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @01:00AM (#62379029)
    Student loans are the reason college is expensive.

    It is a case of broken economics and unintended consequences. Colleges are fundamentally bureaucracies that will grow like cancers and spend all funds made available to them. Student loans were created to make college affordable to more Americans. But student loan money was given to schools without strings. There was no requirement that it only be demonstrably used to educate the student. There is no contract, no overhead-rate cap on the use of college loan funds.

    Colleges received the loan money, spent it and raised tuition. The government raised the amount they would back, so banks lent more. Rinse and repeat for four decades and we are where we are now.

    • >" Student loans are the reason college is expensive. It is a case of broken economics and unintended consequences."

      +1000

      ^THIS more than anything else. There are lots of problems, but this is the biggest. It breaks the free market because when people don't care about the price, then obviously the price will go up and up. The exact same thing happened in the housing market and that exploded.

      If the colleges/universities themselves were responsible for the pain of non-payment, things would change

  • I don't know about a "collapse" but there are definitely problems. First, K12 got dumbed down to the point where the high school diploma that used to be your ticket was no longer it. Now a bachelor's degree is the new "ticket". That was bad enough, but then they went and decided to make it something that was heavily financed. That was the real kicker. Anything that's financed tends to go up in cost until you can reasonably assume that people will be able to afford the payments that support the inflated

  • That and if one looks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @02:20AM (#62379111)
    One finds that most colleges have more (generally highly paid) administrators than teaching staff and that the teaching staff is mostly adjunct. Adjunct meaning zero job security and comparatively low pay, Also, tenure track is a much scarcer commodity than it used to be.

  • Good. (Score:2)

    by Chas ( 5144 )

    The entire system is so screwed up that it needs to go down in a flaming pile of fail.

    While the massive subsidization of scholarships and loans have helped people become upwardly mobile, it has massively and artificially inflated the price of education all out of relation to actual costs. At this point, college is a predatory business practices incubator.

    It's also inflated the footprint of educational institutions in terms of manpower required and driven down the quality and substance of instruction.
    This i

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