Now I know youâre writing from long ago â even the STEM grad students are aware that these are ideals seldom spotted in the wild. Theyâre busy dispensing (a hundred years late) with the idea of objectivity now, theyâre well aware of how individual interests and viewpoints control choices and judgments made in science, they know the nausea that comes with digging too far into âwe know thatâ (the ground tends to evaporate under you), and the verifiability problems are well-known. It is, as the K-12 standards remind us, a human endeavor.
Thereâs lots thatâs terrific about science, but this rhetoric of rationalism and stainless certainties isnât really the stuff that makes it great, imo. Or makes it function. Itâs good for claiming authority, but even that doesnât work as well as it once did; the larger culture doesnât support it.
This is not what we found, Iâm afraid. LACs without very large endowments or religious support are on shaky ground, and their aid still leaves them costing thousands more per year than the state Us do unless youâre in PA or another very expensive state system. Theyâre also very tightly focused on one or two things because they have to be, or, worse, theyâre not much good at anything. They also play a dicey faculty game, because their faculties are small â theyâre stuck with the hobbyhorses they hire for decades, and no great variety of them. At a state U, youâve got good flowthrough, less patchy coverage of more, and if youâre in a discipline that needs toys, probably lots of toys. Generationsâ worth in various states of disrepair. Anyway. We found the LACs to be less interested in hooks than in cash.
Itâs interesting watching that small-faculty-in-amber thing play out at the high school level. My daughter goes to the local public high school, which has a few English teachers, and theyâre mostly of an age. Which means sheâs been reading 1980s/90s Greatest Undergraduate Hits for the last four years. Nemerov, even. I didnât think Iâd see him on a syllabus again. Theyâre also possibly the last cohort to read âA&Pâ. Iâm not saying theyâre bad selections, mind, but things do go stale.
Now Iâm really mystified. Why would anyone want to do a non-elite PhD when academia is vastly oversupplied with just the graduates of elite programs? Were those students ever targeting the âelite society definingâ jobs talked about earlier in the thread? When was a non-elite PhD an engine of âupward mobility from middle/lower-middle/working classesâ?
Isnât the usual advice that you are wasting your time doing a PhD if you canât get into an elite program? Hasnât that been the case for a very long time indeed (at least since the Vietnam draft ended)?
The problemâs that many more jobs require advanced degrees (PhD and masterâs) now, or hire them preferentially. So even if a kidâs not off to the White House, that advanced degree becomes quite important when it comes to âare you manager class or expendable contract-worker classâ and other more job-specific questions, also âcan you get licensedâ.
You do a non-elite PhD rather than an MA or MS or M__ because few will pay you to do a masterâs degree, but most will pay you to go after a PhD. So if you join a PhD program and bail or fail at comps or equivalent, youâre still leaving with a masterâs degree, but without the six-figure debt for it.
I should also say that for teaching at non-elites and CCs, elite grad degrees are not necessarily a great thing. If you want to teach CC, Iâd urge you not to go elite for your PhD. Youâll have a hell of a time understanding your students, your colleagues will find you draining to deal with, you probably wonât get the job in the first place because youâre trouble on legs in that context. A PhD from State U, or a master with a lot of pedagogyâs from Wherever State U, is probably your bet. Jill Bidenâs U Del PhD: just right.
But with the internet, there are a ton of options available to someone driven that wouldnât have been in the âgood old daysâ. You could learn a lot online (I mean, MITâs entire curriculum is online), get cheap yet solid online masters degrees from GTech, apply to join YCombinator.
Also, if youâre good enough, isnât the Foreign Service selection test driven?
Now yes, if you are insistent on going in to a field where it is more difficult to judge ability, networking and connections matter and you donât start off with money and connections. . . . well, I donât know why youâre playing that game.
Seems like a good reason for why these programs wonât get much respect, if students are going in with the intention of bailing part way through, and only those who canât find something better to do with their life stick it out.
And it seems weâve moved on to the "manager class or expendable contract-worker classâ (the sort of students who might be better advised to do a vocational/STEM degree?) rather than the âelite society defining jobsâ (that you claimed were better off studying history).
Before we talk anymore about CS and tech, YCombinator and the like, can we pause and acknowledge that these are generally, and unusually, hellish environments for women and BIPOC, and that discrimination is rampant to the point of driving top people out routinely? If we want to talk about sexism and racism in VC, boy do I have friends ready to vent about that.
To shove girls at YCombinator and not mention these things is like talking like these skills-gap people who donât want to acknowledge that women who do push into trades are routinely harassed and physically threatened right back out, and have a hell of a time making money.
Take a step back from the classism and ca. 1980s assumptions, and youâll see that people do this out of necessity, and that the programs tolerate it out of necessity. Itâs what happens when you put gates up everywhere and make it exceptionally difficult to get through them without big bags of your own money.
There are many other reasons why those programs wonât get respect, btw, but a lot of them go back to money as well.
Boy, arenât you cranky. As a woman engineer in an engineering company in SV, I can tell you that my company is actively promoting women and minorities, and is very mindful of and reports on their representation every quarter. They make sure I am paid exactly as much or better than my male colleagues, and I feel very secure in my position.
To be fair, yes, it is terrible and unfair.
As is being from a poor family. Nobody chose to be from a poor family.
Iâd like to level the societal playing field too (a stronger safety net would be helpful in that respect).
But challenges of some sort will never go away for most people, so it really comes down to how you deal with them.
In any case, being BIPOC/female in the US, unless youâre living in constant instability and crushing poverty, you still have it better than most of the humans on the earth.
Thatâs all true. There are lots of unnecessary barriers in US society, erected by incumbents to defend their turf and endorsed by naive politicians. Credentialism in particular is a huge problem. Who thought it was a good idea to require that childcare workers in DC should have a college degree?
But I thought your original concern was about barriers to super talented but unconnected kids not having access to âelite society defining jobsâ? This thread wonât go anywhere if itâs just a litany of everything that is wrong in US society. And those problems certainly wonât be solved by just throwing billions of dollars at universities.
Arguably there might even be a case to concentrate the most talented students in elite institutions (honors colleges, top publics and privates) rather than dispersing them amongst âaverage state Usâ. Then a solution could be outreach by the elite institutions to find those super talented students wherever they are.
Thatâs what is being tried in the UK, where Oxbridge actually wants to admit only the most talented students. I see regular messages in my social media feed about the outreach they are conducting in deprived areas, including the very impoverished town where I grew up. The problem in the US is that admitting the most talented students is not the highest priority for elite institutions.
In subjects where there is demand for PhDs in industry (e.g. engineering and CS), someone aiming for such a research job may choose to do a PhD (funded, of course). The backup, of course, is a ânormalâ job in that subject. (But note that many graduate students are international students, for whom graduate study in the US is an affordable way into the US, and a graduate degree is presumably helpful in getting a job and work visa afterward, compared to a bachelorâs degree.)
But in subjects where the only market demand for PhDs is academic, and there are hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job, that does not look like a particularly attractive prospect.
You and I have a different definition of what science is. A conjecture or a hypothesis in science or math is just a reasonable speculation, but a speculation nonetheless, unless and until it is proven or verified to the full satisfaction of everyone working in the field. Physicists, for example, verified predictions from quantum electrodynamics to a precision within a few parts in a billion. Scientists also donât pretend they know things for certain and in perpetuity. One of the most fundamental laws of nature is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and science evolves as our knowledge advances. Anything that canât be observed or isnât verifiable isnât science.
Well â as someone who used to use a lot of childcare, takes ECE seriously, and used to pay childcare workers well above market rate because the work deserves to be well-compensated, Iâd say itâs an excellent idea. The problem isnât that serious jobs require training and education. The problemâs that the edâs inaccessible to far too many.
To be clear: I donât think there are that many âsuper talentedâ kids anywhere. There are a lot of very bright and highly trained kids in some places, and equally bright and less-well-trained kids in others. But talentâs not that easy to come by. The problem I was talking about at the top of the thread had to do with the gating that prevents really quite good kids being able to get at society-defining jobs if they arenât rich and connected, but sends them through if they are rich and connected. âSuper talentedsâ do get in the gate, btw, in the EA slice. Theyâre needed to keep the elite U glowing.
Throwing billions of dollars at universities is, I think, going to be necessary just to keep them open and accessible to most people who need to go, including people whoâre going to be doing work that sounds utterly mundane, like (example from today) CSR work at large insurers, fielding complex questions about hundreds of policy types. And not just billions of dollars. Hundreds of billions of dollars. I had occasion to do the math last spring, when I wondered why, if we were so scared that we were going to lose OOS kids during the pandemic, we didnât just cut them a break on tuition for a year or two. So I did the math, and the math is staggering. That wouldâve been a âyou sank my battleshipâ loss, cutting them that break.
The average large state research U budget runs around $1B, and about half that sumâs coming from the students at this point, meaning there are now sizeable populations that donât go to school because they canât afford the state U, and others who drop out before degree because theyâre out of money (but now have debt plus no degree). Much infrastructure maintenance is bond-funded now, so state systems are frequently billions in the hole, which is a new thing. State research Us can pull in maybe a quarter to a third of the budget with grants, but thatâs an option available only to R1s. So if you actually made college affordable to most of the kids who need to go to school, rolled their cost back to 1980, youâd add about 30% to the budget to replace their tuition, and you still wouldnât have the state Us staffed to handle the work, the facilities maintained properly, etc.; the hulls are rotted under the brochures after decades of neglect. The real costs would be closer to $1.75-2B/yr.
If you figure that each state has two major campuses, now youâre looking at around $200B per year in ops cost nationally just for U of and State U, and of course the college landscapeâs much more crowded than that. State and research funding, plus much lower tuition, would cover about 40%. So about $1B per giant campus in aid, per year, is needed just to get to the point of having all the kids who need to go actually go and finish, get through without massive debt, have a university that works most of the time, isnât a terrible high-stakes video game to get through because itâs falling apart on the inside, and keeps cost low enough that students can actually find the things theyâre good at and care about, and will pour passion and energy into, instead of pretending they know what theyâre going to do with their lives when theyâre 17, and winding up trapped expensively in something they never were cut out for and struggling to find work in anyway, because the people selling the majors to them know bupkes about the actual industries; theyâre PhDs who know how to make more PhDs.
So yeah. Around $100B/yr. I donât know what to tell you except that education is expensive, and a big country needs a lot of it. The question is who pays for it. I have no problem with paying higher taxes â even though I have less disposable income than most â for a better-educated population with a strong middle class thatâs willing to take a risk and can, if so inclined and with some talent for that kind of thing, find its way into society-defining work. <-MAGA.
This happens in the form of national programs â AAAS does a good job and so do a lot of other orgs. I got sent along to that sort of thing in the mid-80s. But I certainly wouldnât want to take the kids away from the public campuses. How are they supposed to stay in touch with how other people live and, maybe more important, think? What friends will they have outside the hothouse? If youâre going to be steering society and doing a good job of it, youâd better know what society is. Also, frankly, it bites for the universities when they leave. Yeah, I donât think more vigorous stratification is the answer to the problem of stratification.
Mm. Having worked in Commons and at LSE I am not convinced of the virtues of collecting the best and brightest from the land and dressing them in house scarves so that they can go on to serve the actual toffs acceptably. Shifting the balance of power back in the direction of the publics â where it once was in this country, which worked remarkably well â is I think preferable.
More likely to happen if more states establish stuff like the HOPE/Zell Miller scholarships that GA has (also would have to fund publics as much as GA does).
Thatâs spectacular. Would you mind messaging me the name of the company? Because it deserves promotion. Itâs not the normal state of affairs: Women in Tech Face Increased Wage Discrimination - IEEE Spectrum (actually a IEEE piece on the state of gender discrimination in pay in tech)
Please tell me this sentiment isnât coming from a top 5% income white male U of C grad.
I still have a lot of work to do tonight and am not going to take time to reflect on the last two decadesâ extraordinarily poorly-supported work raising and supporting a child on my own in this country. With friends abroad deeply concerned and asking whether it wasnât possible for me to move to their countries, which had (and have) much better social supports. Nor am I going to spend time revisiting what it was like before ACA, living like that.
Nope. I never had any intention of it, actually. Itâs just one of the last homes of the social safety net, so although very poorly compensated next to industry, the stability and flexibility were what I needed as single mother of a young child. I keep in touch with corporate life, bridge students to it, and only stopped doing contract work a few years ago.
Georgia is not one of the lower student loan debt states in this map: Interactive Map - The Institute for College Access & Success . It is not the worst, though (the worst are some of the usual suspects like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware). Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, and California are among the lowest student loan debt states.
Now I know youâre writing from long ago â even the STEM grad students are aware that these are ideals seldom spotted in the wild. Theyâre busy dispensing (a hundred years late) with the idea of objectivity now, theyâre well aware of how individual interests and viewpoints control choices and judgments made in science, they know the nausea that comes with digging too far into âwe know thatâ (the ground tends to evaporate under you), and the verifiability problems are well-known. It is, as the K-12 standards remind us, a human endeavor.