"One reason universities get away with this horseshit is that they're able to take advantage of very smart people who caught an idea very early in life-- that schooling opens doors and improves one's life-- and failed to disavow themselves of it when it was no longer true."
You went too far -- education does open doors, and if we're going to have any hope for the future, we need to continue to strive for a world where that's a fact. I know that it's fashionable to bash higher education in this forum, but an economy that's driven by technological progress takes more than high-school kids who know Python and HTML. At any rate, I sincerely hope that this isn't the first generation where education no longer correlates positively with economic success.
That said, I agree that Universities are taking advantage of naive young people -- especially when it comes to PhD programs. But if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we have to start from the premise that higher education is itself a virtue.
I don't think universities deliberately take advantage of either students or professors. I think the people who run them are for the most part genuinely idealistic. The problem is that universities (through lack of competition and inelasticity of demand) got to be terribly inefficient, and thus gradually and unintentionally ended up in a position where they were taking advantage of people.
I was once told directly by some faculty when I was in grad school that programs in the natural sciences will often intend for a 30-50% dropout rate for grad students, because they need lots of TA's for large first year undergrad classes, but don't have funds/means to graduate all of those students as PhD's. This wasn't along the lines of plan for such a dropout rate, but actively desire it. It was a pretty disheartening thing to hear. I think most faculty would like to be able to graduate all of the students, but they also see it as an additional way of weeding out the bottom half of the class.
I also discussed this with some other professors in chemical engineering (a much smaller program, with very few TA's) and they told me that their dropout rate was essentially zero.
From what I understand, this sort of thing is common in departments as diverse as English, math, and various foreign languages; the reason is that those departments tend to teach a lot of low-level courses, so they need a lot of TAs. (I'm a PhD student in a math department, and my department doesn't do what you describe, but some of the departments I considered were like that which is why I didn't ultimately choose them.)
I agree that it's not a conscious process, but I don't know if it's a matter of efficiency -- a lot of high-value work gets done cheaply at Universities. There's plenty of competition for grant money, too.
The inelasticity seems to be on the labor side of the equation -- no matter how badly students and post-docs are treated, they keep coming back for more. My intuition is that stricter limits on fellowships (i.e. at most X years of government funding; more like the UK system), would provide less perverse incentives for everyone. But any politician to propose such a move would be pilloried for opposing science.
I've just finished a phd in the humanities at oxford (full-funded, took four years to the day), and overall enjoyed the experience (I also used the flexibility of my schedule to get involved in start-ups and recently sold my first one in a modest trade sale). What astounds me about the US system is the amount of time it takes to do a phd - the article said 9 years is not uncommon. Regardless of whether there is or is not demand for humanities phds outside or inside academia, I think 9 years is too long - I mean your going to be a student in your 30s.
But if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we have to start from the premise that higher education is itself a virtue.
To the contrary, I would say that if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we can correctly start from a premise that LEARNING is a virtue, a personal virtue that has positive externalities for society. But then we have to ask if institutions of higher education are effective at all, and economically efficient if shown to be effective, at providing learning. Learning is a wonderful thing, but much of learning occurs outside school walls, and some very socially useful learning doesn't gain the learner a credential such as a Ph.D.
The research you end up doing, the collaborations you end up fostering, those are not possible in any other environment. Of course, a lot of learning occurs outside school boundaries, but some very important learning occurs within those walls, and that learning is hard.
Plus, not all learning (I would say the most important bits) have anything to do with economics or being socially useful, especially in the natural sciences.
You went too far -- education does open doors, and if we're going to have any hope for the future, we need to continue to strive for a world where that's a fact
Some education does, some doesn't. You can't conflate EE with Gender Consciousness in Mediaeval French Poetry, or whatever nonsense is being taught in the humanities these days. The flawed ideas is that all education is equally worthwhile and I'd argue that infact, that was never true.
I don't think anybody (at least to my knowledge) on this forum actively is bashing learning, or even education. After all, heck, technology is one sector where if you are not constantly learning you're dying. We live on the edge. Everything we can accomplish is based on what we can learn and then produce, especially in a startup environment.
Nor do I think people are bashing the wonderful and professional folks that are part of the collegiate system -- although some comments anecdotally move in that direction. Part of growing up is realizing that good people can be stuck in bad situations, i.e., nobody goes to work thinking "I'm sure glad I'm part of a system that is terribly awful!"
The rub of the matter is twofold: 1) Do the packages of learning and education put together by institutions actually hold together into something you might find cohesive and useful 30 years later? 2) Are the results of consuming these pre-packaged experiences worth the clearly staggering costs?
When I look at systems, whether political, computerized, social, or process, I'm looking for feedback mechanisms. How does the system self-adjust? In democratic politics, for instance, we have elections which can completely change policy and the direction of the country. Likewise in programming we have unit tests and frequent validation with users to make sure we're doing what we're supposed to.
I don't see that in higher education. When I look at the inflation-adjusted costs for a four-year degree in the U.S., for instance, it looks an awful lot to me like a system run amok. There's simply no way we're getting that much more value from a 4-year degree than we were 40 years ago. In fact, to be frank, it looks like public funding has created a system where colleges keep pushing the limits wondering where the ceiling is. If Joe Blow School of Fine Arts is charging $40K per year, surely Harvard is worth $80K, right? And whatever Harvard charges, guess what? Rich folks will pay. And because rich folks will pay, the rest of us will pony up the money so poor kids can go too. It just continues. It's a system without any feedback.
People go on at length about the socialization that happens in college, and I believe there are some valuable things there. But I spent time in the military and in college, and I got a lot of good socialization skills in the military too. Got to spend a lot of time outdoors, both learning and immediately applying knowledge in real-world situations. The Peace Corps, I imagine, is the same way.
So it's not a good or bad question. It's more of a question of "can't we get some of these same things somewhere else in a less expensive and easier-to-consume manner?" What are our options for training our future workforce? You can't have optimum performance in a system with only one option. It's a recipe for stagnation and laxness.
I used the word "schooling" instead of "education" intentionally, as I was speaking more about institutionalized, credential-backed education.
College used to open doors. Now it's essentially mandatory if you want even the right to apply for a decent white-collar job, and doesn't guarantee anything, because far too many people are going and there are too few good entry-level jobs out there.
The only way to save college is to cut it back to the status of something that's available to an elite 5-10%-- and I (along with most of us) would obviously prefer that this "elite" be chosen based purely on talent and not on means or family connections.
However, my point on the "idea [...] that schooling opens doors and improves one's life" was not that this idea is false. On the contrary, it's true of grade school, high school, and college. It's an idea that is dangerous on account of being true for a long time, then failing abruptly and catastrophically. (These are the sorts of ideas that form bubbles, e.g. tulip bulbs/tech stocks/houses are sure, good investments.)
With humanities PhD programs, the connection between education and social mobility semi-silently ceases to be true at that level, and there are a lot of students who aren't aware of the switch that has taken place until it's too late to turn back.
You went too far -- education does open doors, and if we're going to have any hope for the future, we need to continue to strive for a world where that's a fact. I know that it's fashionable to bash higher education in this forum, but an economy that's driven by technological progress takes more than high-school kids who know Python and HTML. At any rate, I sincerely hope that this isn't the first generation where education no longer correlates positively with economic success.
That said, I agree that Universities are taking advantage of naive young people -- especially when it comes to PhD programs. But if we're going to have a serious discussion about the flaws in higher education system, we have to start from the premise that higher education is itself a virtue.