[141205]

"The bulk of US college students attend colleges who do not have the resources to build high-quality, industry relevant curriculum, train teachers to teach with modern pedagogy, and efficiently manage dorms, student affairs, and other administrative infrastructure"

I would like to see a source on this: your claim appears ungrounded when considering American colleges.

[DesaiAshu]

It is generally understood in the industry that around half of universities are in significant debt / financial distress (started prior to Covid // the demographic peak // recent DoE cuts). Graduate underemployment is also quite high due to a lack of alignment (or perhaps slow alignment) of degree programs to career outcomes

https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-...

https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2025/aug/jobs-degrees-...

Ideas for solutions here:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED604299.pdf

[fc417fc802]

Can we take a minute to consider that degrees aren't supposed to be aligned to career outcomes to begin with? That's what vocational schools are for. Somehow academia became conflated with both a job training program and an adult daycare service and (at least in the US) the result is a confused, inconsistent, expensive mess whose exact purpose isn't clear.

[bpt3]

You want them to go back to being finishing schools for the wealthy, as they were before Hopkins (funnily enough) founded the first institute in the US that would be seen as a form of a modern university today?

For people who aren't financially independent, education is a means to an end. Pretending that's not the case or worse, shouldn't be the case, is absurd to ask of anyone running a school and highly damaging to society in general, and the mix of "vocational training" and "classic academia" provided by most US universities seems to work extremely well.

[fc417fc802]

You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction.

We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).

I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.

If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors? I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia. The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.

[bpt3]

> You're putting words in my mouth. I merely pointed out that they have a very confused mission thus I think it is not surprising that there is dysfunction.

I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.

> We have vocational trade schools. We have professional guild schools (medical, dentistry, etc). At least some subset of students attends school with the intention of becoming professional researchers (ie pursuing a PhD, then a postdoc, then finally general employment).

> I think it would be reasonable to expect undergraduate institutions to set unambiguous goals for each program. Students should know what they are signing up for. It would be fine to graduate with a certain amount of time spent explicitly on general education and a certain amount spent explicitly on vocational training with a specific target.

I agree that undergraduate institutions should be required to set unambiguous goals for each program, but what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"? I think there is value in having these multi-faceted institutions that are a combination of finishing school, classical academic study, and vocational training that can (and do) produce sufficiently educated and mature adults who can independently function in society.

That is the mission of the undergraduate portion of the Arts and Sciences school at basically every college/university. Professional schools have a slightly more specific mission.

> If you claim that education is a means to an end then what of (for example) history majors?

Excellent question, and it's one for the history department to answer. Maybe things stay as they are now and it's a home for the many people who don't have specific career goals while attending college, and that is their goal.

> I think the bachelors diploma itself is what became a means to an end much to the detriment of "pure" academia.

"Pure" academia only exists for those with a patron (which could be themselves), which is non-existent at any meaningful scale.

> The CS program at my undergrad spent time teaching us how to use version control. That's fantastic for a professional programmer but how does that have anything to do with CS as an academic pursuit? You can literally do much (perhaps all) of actual CS with nothing more than a pen and paper.

Good for them, because anyone applying their CS knowledge in any capacity needs to know that.

If you want to go major in purely theoretical CS at a place that offers only courses that are effectively a specialization of a math major, there is value in it but the department offering them has to answer the same questions as the history department.

[fc417fc802]

It seems we largely agree. For example I wasn't criticizing the CS program at my undergrad, simply observing the mismatch between the label on the tin and what was actually inside.

Observations of inconsistencies, dysfunctions, and similar are not necessarily calls for any particular course of action.

> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but I don't see what other conclusion can be drawn from your statement.

I merely observed that many of the issues people point out can be traced back (at least IMO) to having a set of confused and inconsistent goals. I wouldn't expect it to be a particularly controversial observation to anyone who's had significant contact with US academia within the past few decades.

> what are done with the many, many attendees who have no goals for themselves beyond "go to college and get a job when I'm done"?

They probably don't belong there. Most of them only attend because you need a diploma to land a job. Not because the education is particularly useful to the job, but rather because of what diplomas historically signaled about a candidate before everyone had them. Now it seems to just be a holdover (ie we require them because we've always required them and at this point everyone worthwhile has one). At least that's my (admittedly quite cynical) view.

I'm all for a more educated populace but if that's what we want then we should directly implement that.

I notice that you didn't address my remark about "adult daycare service". The presence of directionless "students" attending only to tick a box has serious negative impacts on the rest of the system. Add in student loans that can't be discharged and you've created an absolutely bizarre and (IMO counterproductive) set of economic incentives.

[PearlRiver]

Actually not true the first universities were supposed to produce clergy for the church.