[microarchitect]

This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN.

Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.

This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.

Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.

The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.

Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.

Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.

Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.

I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.

This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

[johnnybgoode]

  > terrible article
  > Awfully muddled thinking
  > right-wing propaganda
  > laughably poor argument
  > propagandist rant

All of the above were unnecessary. I'll address the rest of your comment now.

  > First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".

Typically, when cuts are being made, people across the political spectrum prefer to cut services for the middle class before cutting services for the poor. Most people agree that cutting services for the poor is a last resort. I am not arguing here that this is necessarily correct or that you have to agree, but that is the reason for the emphasis on "serving the poor" when discussing cuts to government programs.

  > Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?

Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?

  > And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.

They are part of the same system. The connection between the increase in student loan limits and the increase in student tuition has been noted many times. See elsewhere in this thread.

  > Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

In addition to what monochrome and yummyfajitas have said, anywhere you look, you can find job listings for relatively simple, entry-level positions that unnecessarily require university degrees. Ever since we started pushing the idea that everyone should go to college, we've seen a signaling arms race where you'd better get a college degree or face being passed over for someone else who did -- whether or not the job really needed someone with a degree. This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

  > Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

  > would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades

You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.

[microarchitect]

Hmm. I think is a poor article because it lacks depth and simply makes a bunch of assertions many of which don't even follow from the premises in the article itself. I might have refrained from saying so explicitly had I thought you were actually interested in exploring the question and were gathering information, but it seemed to me that you've made up your mind and are working backwards from your conclusion.

You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.

Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?

My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?

Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.

This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.

No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.

Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.

yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.

That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.

If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.

I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.

[1] http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem... [2] http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college-u... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approv...

[johnnybgoode]

  > What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities?

I take it you've agreed universities are skewed towards the middle class and higher in terms of direct enrollment (and this is easily verifiable). To counter this, you talked about indirect effects:

  > Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries.

How can you prove this? I don't think it's possible, but if you can I'm all ears.

  > Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?

I'm claiming one of the reasons university tuition is being increased is that we're in an environment where degrees are seen as being necessary, whether or not they are. In other words, degrees are being treated as an inelastic good. Therefore students are willing to pay whatever they can afford. As student loan limits increase, what students can afford to pay increases, so tuition increases as well. If even part of the tuition increases come from this, and your college president is making $1 million/year, I think it's fair to call that waste.

  > This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.

It's a product of the system we live in because we created and subsidized that system. Lowering the subsidy is the first step to solving the problem. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608680

  > You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree

This is completely false. I did not say anything of the kind. In fact, I'm making the exact opposite point, so now I'm wondering if you understood what I was saying at all. I said universities are "fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value".

  > yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.

No, I was referring to this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3608628

yummyfajitas directly counters the same claim I was referring to.

  > That's not what I'm claiming.

No, that is exactly what you claimed. You said, word-for-word, that it "would've been impossible [for me to publish the article] without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades".

  > If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting

Yes, I'm claiming there is more than one way to do research. Your claim, that what was done was the only possible way to do it, is extraordinary to me. And again, that is what you're claiming when you say it "would've been impossible" for me to publish an article on the internet.

[moonchrome]

>Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value?

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.

>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.

[microarchitect]

Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, geology, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the experience (or even a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution).

I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value" which is different from your claim that you can't do some things of value that without a degree.

In any case, none of this is an indictment of the university itself. While I agree that it's possible that some of these professions might be better served with looser guidelines, I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion.

I'm not sure what you mean by "crowding out of R&D investment". If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

I'm not disagreeing with this statement of yours, but I hope you realize that you're arguing a much weaker and better articulated position than the OP. If the OP is suggesting that we re-examine how federal grant money is allocated, I would consider that a defensible position. But he's clearly not saying that and has chosen instead to launch a broadside against the university institution and seems to have no evidence backing up his assertions.

[moonchrome]

>If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?

Sorry it should have been private R&D investment. I'm saying that there is evidence that suggests that public grants to R&D crowd out private investment, that public R&D doesn't correlate with GDP growth, that private R&D does and that grants are inferior to market approaches such as tax breaks for R&D. I think that video I linked overstates the strength of the evidence and it's conclusiveness but it's still a valid point and goes against the accepted view. Also the argument that the Internet is here only because of public R&D is very hard to make because at every instance I've looked at where public R&D gets credited (eg. CERN) there is similar work done separately in the private sector (eg. Xerox PARC). I'm not saying that the evidence is definitive, that all public science funding doesn't generate GDP growth, that GDP growth is a good metric of the value created by public R&D or that public funding is inferior to private, those are all empirical questions (or even unanswerable/subjective) and can't be generalized. I'm just saying that the position you seem to take - without public funding it wouldn't get done - isn't true both historically (eg. check out Nobel prizes from IBM and Bell labs in pure research) and you can make a theoretical argument why that is the case.

As for the authors post, yeah it's a rant but I get where he's coming from.

[microarchitect]

Fair enough, this is a viewpoint I can agree with. I don't think this is what the OP had in mind, though. Or if he did, he didn't do a good job of articulating it.

[yummyfajitas]

...I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.

If you reduce subsidies for wasteful signalling, people will do less of it. Employers will then find signal based discrimination more difficult and expensive, and will reduce their dependence on it.

[microarchitect]

The assumption here is that education has a significant component which is "wasteful signalling". If this is true, and that's a pretty big if, what you say follows. If the assumption is not true, reducing funding would result in a poorly educated populace which could spell economic disaster.

My point is: (1) this is not an issue we can decide without looking at the data and (2) making a claim one way or another without carefully looking at the data is not justified.

[yummyfajitas]

Here is a blog post discussing data. After graduation, the sheepskin effect is about 50% of the value of a degree. (Over time, as a worker builds up a track record, this goes down.)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2a012/01/the_present_val...

Unless you believe human capital jumps massively between 116 credits and 120 credits, this is strong evidence in favor of the signalling model.

Another big chunk of the measured returns to education are merely ability bias.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/correcting_for.h...

[yummyfajitas]

Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

Yes it does. Please learn about signalling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)

If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.

[microarchitect]

Interesting link but you seem to be missing the point.

I agree there may be an argument to be made that in cases, under certain circumstances, provided you can measure certain variables, the best action that results the "most public good" would be reducing university funding. If that's what you want to argue, then you'll need to do the legwork of gathering data that supports this conclusion.

The OP has not done that and is not even attempting to do so. He's made some overly simplistic arguments against university funding that are utterly lacking in depth.

EDIT: Can the downvoters please explain themselves?

[learc83]

>Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.

>I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on?

Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided.

I don't think you'll find anyone who will seriously argue with the premise that there are far more left leaning than right leaning professors.

Anecdote: When I was in college, I was much more conservative than I am now. I experienced outright disdain for my relatively moderate political beliefs from the majority of my professors and my peers; so much so that after a year or two I got tired of it and just learned to shut up.

[microarchitect]

I didn't respond to that argument because of multiple reasons.

First, this is the same argument that many creationists, followers of intelligent design and other religious nuts use to discredit evolution. In fact, if you look up the wikipedia page for Expelled: No intelligence allowed, you'll see that the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP and in fact, my instinctive response when I read this bit, thanks to having heard this so many times from creationists was to immediately assume assume the OP was one. I didn't want this to color the rest of my response so I decided to ignore this bit.

Also, it's seems like flamebait to me. I suspect the OP threw it in there to antagonize those who disagreed with that idea while simultaneously enlisting the support of everyone who was once slighted for his/her political views by a professor.

Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding? I must be missing something because this makes no sense.

Also, the OP's made a very broad claim that most university departments are rife with ideology and hostile to conflicting views. You are referring to some instances of ridicule relating to the specific subject of political views, which is a much much weaker claim.

PS. I believe there's research that shows that the political leanings of professors has little effect on the political views of students. And I'm sorry that you were ridiculed and I think this is unacceptable behavior.

[learc83]

>Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding?

No. I don't even know if it could be fixed. It could be something inherent to academia for whatever reason.

>specific subject of political views

Political views tend to encompass a large portion of a person's identity. A suppressive atmosphere towards a particular political belief can have a much larger stifling effect (outside of mere political discussion).

[johnnybgoode]

  > the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP
  > immediately assume assume the OP was one

Come on. This is an obvious case of unwarranted guilt by association. For the record, I've never seen Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, and from briefly looking up what the film is about, I don't think I'd agree with it at all.

[microarchitect]

As I said, this was my instinctive response and I'm sorry about that. I'm glad you're not a creationist. :-)