[sykick]

Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.

[sytelus]

Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn’t have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can’t get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.

[sykick]

Your first sentence sounds plausible and could be true. Do you know that it is true? Do the demographics of the country support an increase in higher education capacity? Do the realities of what it means to become educated support a percent increase in the number of highly education people?

I currently teach at a community college and have taught at some major universities. What I consider passing today is far less than what I would have considered passing 25 years ago. My anecdotal experience is that too many people are going to college. Standards have decreased and we are passing people through the system who should not be graduating. Even so there is increasing pressure from administration and politicians to increase the passing rate.

At my college tuition is increasing because state funding is decreasing. We are advertising to a population who realistically aren't college material. But we need the enrollment and I need a job. So I pass people who shouldn't pass. I strongly disagree with the notion that we need more colleges.

EDIT: What I perceive as a degradation in undergraduate degree quality has led to the present state where a Master's degree today has the same intellectual signaling value that a Bachelor's degree had 40 years ago.

[sytelus]

I'm very familier with these views and staunchly opposed to them. Here the idea is that only a small portion of the population is "college worthy" and only those elites should be going to college. This then implies we don't need "too many" educated people and economy perhaps can't even handle them. I don't subscribe to any of these.

I believe, education needs to be distangled from jobs. People should not be educated for the sole purpose of slaving away 8 hours a day somewhere. Education is about learning, deeper reflections, aquiring skills you enjoy, developing reasoning, identifying pitfalls, dealing with abstractions, practising scientific methods, becoming desciplined. Only as side effect of all these, you might be able to also do well at some job. This means everyone is entitled to the highest level of education. In an ideal world, all humans should obtain a PhD in something they are passionate about, something they believe in and something they are interested in.

Now here's the problem. We have mutilated our education philosophy to the extent that it is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. When you step in modern day institutes, the education is all about getting good grades and passing exames. I have met inenumerable humans, starting from Kindergarten to PhDs where they are forced to memorize things, instead of really understand things in order to pass exams. People who don't have great memory powers are forced out of the system. Other day I was looking at 1st grade history lesson on Columbus. What was the test exam questions? Name the ships! Why does name of ships matter at all? Why not teach kids instead reason he needed 3 ships?

My core hypothesis is that all humans are curious, we all want to learn something, we all have some interests. We destroy most of these attributes as we grow up by making it a massive memorization contest with prizes given as pass and fail. Then we make it all about jobs so folks are forced to learn things they were never interested in the first place.

[sykick]

Your goal is noble. I think it is believed by you because you don’t have extensive experience teaching in a classroom. Everyone talks about teaching concepts and whatnot. I used to think this way. But the reality of the classroom and the reality of what the average person is capable of understanding and what they are willing to try to understand is at odds with this noble view.