College Is Coming Apart After Successive, Overlapping Crises

Comments

Comment by devolving-dev 5 hours ago

I think that what's needed is a separation of concerns. Instead of a monolithic institution that is responsible for research, student enlightenment, self-discovery, vocational training, athletic competition, etc, we could move towards a micro-institution architecture and scale the different micro-institutions according to demand. Importantly, we wouldn't cross-subsidize the institutions, so if someone only wanted self-discovery for example, they could just pay for that and get a cheaper price than someone who wanted both self-discovery and vocational training. People could also decide how much of each they need according to their circumstances.

Comment by whattheheckheck 46 minutes ago

How do you make sure the nepotism families stay in control of the grander scheme

Comment by schmudde 1 hour ago

The article only mentions tuition once - which is the original sin of US universities.

I have generally found that US Americans don't really understand the incredible value that these institutions bring to the overall culture and economy. Thus the broader population has a will to critique but no will to improve the situation.

Comment by 28 minutes ago

Comment by niemandhier 7 hours ago

Solving the problems is like doing a kata in martial arts: It’s not the result, it’s the steps you take that change your mind.

That’s what I told students, when I taught physics for several years during my PhD.

Even back then you could look up solution templates for most of the problems: There are only so many educative small problems that first semester students can solve.

On the other hand: No one studies physics just for a degree and money. So maybe that problem is not as present there, as it is elsewhere.

Comment by 4d4m 4 hours ago

Self inflicted wounds from people so out of touch and wrapped up in their own warped worlds they never bothered to take a pulse on what value creation and service to students meant.

Comment by mitxela 3 hours ago

China doesn't have this problem.

Comment by atoav 6 hours ago

Any society should aim to have the most educated population it can afford to have. Them getting a better earning through it can be a nice side effect of that, but it is a side effect. The main price is that living among educated people beats living among the dumb and uneducated, especially in a democracy.

The US would have no problem affording that education, if it just considered taxing the richest members of its society a reasonable amount, as it did in the past.

Comment by Founderarcstone 8 hours ago

It certainly must be an interesting time to be in the academic world as a professor dealing with all these issues.

Comment by onetokeoverthe 7 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by rendaw 6 hours ago

I was wondering what crises this was referring to. It's paywalled, but if the first couple paragraphs are sufficient it sounds like: students using AI and not learning, researchers using AI and feeling like they no longer have value themselves.

Comment by jhbadger 5 hours ago

It starts out that way, but moves more into the viewpoint that the American university system is several things bundled together that are coming apart and AI is only part of the issue (others are just the Internet in general creating a parallel social life and the current American government deciding that research funding is a political tool rather than a value in itself.) Basically university traditionally is where young people figure out their interests and people they want to hang out with are, the education and credentialing system they need to get a job, and independent of these undergraduates, a research institution bringing in millions of dollars of grant money a year per university, which people not professors or grad students only vaguely aware exist.

Comment by metalman 5 hours ago

the article describes a larger, more general problem that happens when a society can no longer deal with, or export it's contradictions, of which we have an ever growing mountain of absurditys, overseen by an entrenched army of incompetent assholes and idiots, ready to performativly weild there specific NO power, while meticulously observing the theatric rituals assosiated with there positions.