[noosphr]

>California’s public universities spent $16.9 million on A.I. during a financial crisis, and the result has been chaos.

So peanuts.

The public universities budget in California is something like 60 billion.

This isn't even a rounding error.

[vermilingua]

[flagged]

[dang]

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[noosphr]

Why not ask about the mismanagement of the other 60 billion?

[ryan_n]

Is all of the other 60 billion mismanaged?

[vermilingua]

Believe it or not, that other $60b isn’t one chunk of money, but other similar chunks of ~$20m that’s probably being spent in similarly idiotic ways. If this were an article about those, yes I probably would.

[qsxfthnkp2322]

16.9M would have helped pay for quite a bit of student aid.

[throwawaypath]

Definitely. That amount could pay for 20 students to attend classes for a week!

[pesus]

I get the joke, but CSUs are fairly inexpensive as far as universities go. Tuition at SJSU is about $9500 per school year for California residents. That's a year of education for almost 1700 students. It may not seem like a much money to some, but it certainly covers a lot.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

They could buy, like, seven books from the bookstore!

[dvt]

The idea that AI is somehow at fault for the absolute fiscal disaster the UC and the CSU systems find themselves in is laughable at best and damaging at worst. These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA that was on a full academic scholarship) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry. Tuition has consistently gone up since the 70s, while housing, facility, classroom quality have all gone down.

It's been literally the biggest grift of the past 50 years[1]. Education should be free.

[1] https://eliterate.us/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Tuition.png

[jltsiren]

In real terms, tuition fees in public universities peaked in the early 2010s. They have not kept up with inflation since then. That explains a large part of the fiscal disaster.

[dvt]

Can you source this? My cursory research shows the opposite[1]. Imo, the fiscal disaster is in part due to enrollment declining (which, ironically enough, mainly affects low-income households).

[1] https://myelearningworld.com/cost-of-college-vs-inflation/

[jltsiren]

Here is one example: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year

Declining enrollment affects universities very unevenly. University of California is still under pressure to increase enrollment, which is mostly constrained by physical capacity. The housing situation is particularly bad on some campuses.

[irishcoffee]

Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online.

You pay for the rubber stamp.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Amusingly, education is free and I’ll die on this hill. There is nothing you learn at a university that you cannot learn, for free, at a library and online.

There exist parts or even degree courses in university education that cannot really be learned this way. Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.

Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.

Finally, keep in mind that computer science is "special" in the sense that:

- What the university teaches you or should teach you (a degree course at a university rather prepares you for an academic career in the field) makes you quite overqualified (in the academic sense) for many programming jobs. Such topics are possible, but in my opinion far from easy to learn by yourself.

- Many employers want very different skills from applicants, which often involve "fashionable" skills with a very short half-life. A university system is likely not the best kind of education system to teach this kind of skills: it rather (ideally) excels at teaching topics that are complicated, but have a much longer "half-life" before becoming outdated.

[charcircuit]

>Think of laboratory courses or courses where you need access to expensive equipment.

Why do you need equipment to learn something? You can learn the information outside of a lab.

>Also, there exist topics and degree courses that are much harder to learn by yourself than others.

Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

[aleph_minus_one]

> Free AI like ChatGPT can assist with offering many different explanations personalized for someone to make it easier to learn.

What I can tell you is the following: a lot of academic topics are quite subtle - to get to more than a basic level, you have to learn things that are very subtle, and where you only can judge the correctness of the information years later (basically when you have finished your degree or even PhD).

Because of this, I would rather read the most renowned (and ideally hardest) textbooks in the respective area (if you really need to cheap out, download them at some shadow library) instead of trusting some AI.

I can tell you that for quite a lot of questions in my area of expertise, the answers that AIs gave were far from being sufficiently reliable for learners who want to get a deep knowledge about the topic, and the errors were often quite subtle.

In mathematics, for example, it is not uncommon to hang for hours over a page or even a paragraph, trying to understand why the statement holds - and this in a situation where the proof is for sure correct. Now imagine the situation of hanging over a page of text that you will need hours for understanding when you cannot even rely on the prior that the information in the text is correct ...

[jazzyjackson]

The information is how to use a lab, so you can do research, you know, the thing that happens largely on university campuses. (Now why taxpayer funded labs end up patenting things for private corporations, that’s what’s peculiar to me!)

[usefulcat]

Surprisingly, reading about something is very often not at all equivalent to actually doing it.

[AlotOfReading]

Another example is history. It's theoretically possible to become an academic historian through private study and there are certainly no legal barriers to it, yet amateurs almost never make the transition except through higher education.

[mystraline]

> These systems (and I say this as a graduate of UCLA) have been taken over by parasitic administrators and bureaucracies-on-top-of-bureaucracies that have milked not only the students, but also the taxpayers, completely dry.

There is a single person responsible for this.

His name is Reagan.

[noosphr]

It's been 40 years, surely someone could have done something to fix it if they wanted to.

[throwawaytea]

The money spent goes to people, that give it to other people. They didn't just burn it.

[vermilingua]

“People” in this case being Altman and co.

[AceJohnny2]

Money is fungible. Budgets are not.

[mystraline]

> spent $16.9 million on A.I.

Sooooo... A few days of claude code "thinking", for a few hundred people?

[hparadiz]

I use it in the field and my usage isn't even $1000 yet. I think I might be just now getting there after 6 months.