Universities in the US are a giant clusterfuck because they confuse themselves between centers of status/prestige, a place for learning/training, and a semi-professional sports team.
Ironically, I think the biggest dissonance is between two terms you grouped together: "learning/training".
What universities were (and still are) really great at is being a place for intense learning. What 99% of their customers now want is vocational training to get a well paying job.
Exactly because of the status/prestige (+ government incentives + being very far from a free market), customers that don't really want what the university is selling are attending in droves.
Related to this is the death of vocational studies at the high school level. EVERYTHING is "college prep" and there is no other course. Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.
I went to school in a more rural area. In high school we had the option to spend half the day at the vocational school in the next town over learning the trades. Our senior year they also had an assembly to tell us all that statistics were against us in college and only 15% would graduate, so we shouldn’t try.
My nephews are about to enter that same high school about 25 years later. From what I’ve gleaned, they still have the program for vocational training. I think the kids went on a field trip there is middle school.
> Huge numbers of people could avoid universities if we offered better vocational training.
Could they? This is a perennial HN complaint; however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase. That doesn't indicate some mythical pent up demand that a bunch of new vocational students could slot into.
Most people are going to college because they want to avoid working at the equivalent of an Amazon warehouse. If you can give them a way to do that, they'll happily skip going to a university.
Being an electrician or plumber is substantially less soul-crushing than an Amazon warehouse, and if you’re good, pays a hell of a lot better.
Is the pay better?
The pay seems pretty comparable to an Amazon warehouse until you pass at least 3 years of training.
And not everybody gets to wire up air conditioned data centers. A lot of wiring is outside in the hot sun climbing up and down ladders.
If the salaries were significantly better, I should think we'd see a lot of people beating down the doors to be electricians, but we don't ...
The Amazon warehouse across the street from me pays ~$19/h (CAD). Minimum wage is $17.20.
Electrician apprentices make $20-28/h. Once you’re licensed you’re pretty much guaranteed $30+/h, most break $40/h pretty quick if they’re good. If you start your own company (which isn’t that hard here!) you’re probably closer to $60-100/h depending on skill, niche, client base, and luck.
Plumbing is pretty similar but the ceiling’s probably triple that of electricians.
Trade school is so cheap it’s almost free. (My brother just finished an automotive mechanic program, I think his total out-of-pocket cost was like $1500 for a few years of school + apprenticeship, and he was making $30/h by the end of the apprenticeship. He’s now at around $36/h iirc, less than a year out of the program.)
I don’t believe it’s possible to make even apprentice money as an Amazon warehouse worker here. Maybe as a floor manager. And yes, obviously trades aren’t sunshine and rainbows, but if you have even a modicum of motivation you’re better off there than packing boxes.
If the money is superior, then why aren't the people working at Amazon warehouses moving to the trades?
It requires some effort. You have to actually sign up and attend trades school (which requires a non-zero amount of money up front and you’ll go 6-12 weeks without pay - which also can be a problem for some people), then spend some effort finding someone to take you on as an apprentice, and you have to actually think and learn things. Nothing particularly difficult but still, you need some non-zero degree of critical thinking skills.
If you don’t have that level of motivation (which again, is really not that high), you won’t succeed. You can walk into an Amazon warehouse (or honestly, any similar warehouse job) and start working either that day or in very short order, and get paid in 2 weeks or less. It’s the least amount of effort possible to get a job, but it’s also the least rewarding (mentally, financially, etc).
There are also some people who genuinely cannot work in the trades. Almost any kind of physical disability and you’re at a severe disadvantage. Same with mental disabilities (to a lesser degree).
There’s real downsides too. Some trades are fairly dangerous (electrician comes to mind, especially if you’re working with oldheads who are happy to work on live unfused lines/etc) and almost all of them will result in you degrading your body faster than average (although this is also true for warehouse jobs). Buddy of mine caught a piece of shrapnel with his eye (while wearing listed wraparound safety glasses, mind you) while grinding some metal underneath a car, and has permanent vision damage in one eye at age 24. You also have to be pretty tolerant of more… abusive working environments. Aside from general tomfoolery (“boys will be boys” type mindset), there’s a substantially higher chance than average that your colleagues will be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or all of the above, which isn’t great if you fall into one of those categories. It’s a lot better now than it was even 10-15 years ago, but it’s still very much a problem. (I’ve never had an office worker casually drop a hard-r while at work, but I’ve encountered enough tradespeople doing so that I’ve lost count of how many. And not even in an even remotely acceptable way, just whites dudes straight up using it to refer to someone as a slave or similar uses. In the past ~3 years.)
And honestly, probably a lot of people working at warehouses are moving to trades. Warehousing in general is high-turnover (40-50%, if not higher), so it would not shock me if a non-negligible portion of workers are switching to a non-warehouse career. I don’t know how to find stats on that though.
In short, lots of reasons.
All the electricians and operating engineers in the data centers I work at do quite well. We aren't going to need less of that skill set.
> however, the salaries for jobs that vocational schools would train your for show very little pressure to increase.
I mean another perennial HN complaint is about how "off-topic" university CS courses are. Personally, I disagree. I'm with Knuth on this one:
> People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
I mean the major thing I would change about code camps is make it a 1 year or 2 year process and actually get some depth and nuance instead of being a cram school focused more on trying to get you to pass the test than trying to teach you what the test is trying to test.
I live in a prominent college town, and all of the high schools around here have a lot of vocational studies. There is a multi-year track where students actually build an entire house, for instance. I found it surprising and a really good thing. Now, none of it is required, which I think it should be a little bit. But vocational studies is definitely alive in this area.
Of varying importance for different groups/cohorts - going to college because it the rite of passage for adulthood.
> What universities were (and still are) really great at is being a place for intense learning.
Are they? A lot of professors hate and/or are bad at teaching. Especially at R1 research universities.
There are lots of problems, specifically for undergrads:
- Large class sizes
- Professors that don't like teaching
- Professors that can't teach well
- Professors that hand off teaching to TAs, RAs, doctoral students, etc.
- Poor feedback on homework, essays, projects, and exams
- Unnecessary classes
- Outdated classes and curriculum
- Sports programs that serve as recruitment and distraction that are orthogonal to learning
- Admin structures that care more about facilities, growth, and recruitment than learning and research
- Systems that are "too big to fail"
- Student loans that are disconnected from bankruptcy, which feeds a recursively growing monster in such a way that it isn't exposed to evolutionary pressures. There is no risk, so malinvestment doesn't bear consequences.
> What 99% of their customers now want is vocational training to get a well paying job.
You can want a curriculum rich in theory and the vocational training for a well-paying job. The problem is that universities are full of perverse incentives - the admin and faculty are at odds, and often even the faculty itself isn't aligned with teaching.
It's a weird org structure steeped in tradition, nostalgia from alumnus, and a faculty tenure system that doesn't always reward the right things.
When America was founded, universities were basically Bible colleges.
With the enlightenment, came enlightenment values. During this time, study of Greek and Latin were practically standard.
With the coming of industrialization, many adopted the German model of education and became glorified trade schools for the industrial age, churning out classics majors and engineers in equal measure.
Post WW2 with Vannevar Bush's influence, American universities became institutions of research and a crucial part of the military industrial complex.
Finally, with the advent of television, college football became immensely profitable sources of funding for many colleges and universities as well as a huge attraction source for alumni donations.
You say Universities are a clusterfuck, but in reality they have simply evolved with the times, and hence carry a lot of cultural baggage. I don't think that's a bad thing.
It's time to be unburdened by what has been and sharply divide the vocational school and the higher learning/research track like most other first world countries. It's very cruel imo to send mediocre students (who likely won't produce any meaningful research) down research paths while they drown in debt. The state is complicit in this too by guarantee'ing the loans.
And btw, I don't deny that there is value in intermingling vocational studies and cutting edge research - it very much makes sense for some STEM disciplines, but that's the exception not the rule imo.
You think Harvard is a vocational school? Or Columbia, or Stanford, or Princeton for that matter? You think parents like to shell out money presuming their kids are "mediocre"?
The elite schools are still elite schools. They just do cutting edge research now... research originally intended to win a thermonuclear WW3. Their humanities departments of these schools may very well still also stuffed with academics influenced by Soviet active-measures campaigns from the cold-war which actively seek to undermine the power of American institutions to win that long settled conflict.
The agricultural colleges of the 19th century now do research and have football teams now.
American Universities are incredible powerhouses of research. The impact of research efficacy is power law distributed, just like youtube influences, and American wealth. A lot of people in the tech industry seem to be jaded by Universities due to the fact that they've gotten outrageously expensive compared to the median income, that for the past 15 years you can make easier money doing webservices than Greek literature, and the majority of universities are not Harvard or MIT. But you can't deny the enormous contributions to society from American universities. Many people we hold in high regard started off as "mediocre" students.
And the truth is there are many colleges and universities in America that are vocational schools. They just don't want to admit it. How many community colleges in the states are really preparing kids to become nobel laureates? The anti-university sentiment is just another offshoot of the anti-elitism (and perhaps anti-intellectualism) running through American society today... a natural consequence of the situation where you have massively skewed wealth distribution and massively skewed success outcomes from that power law distribution I mentioned earlier.
You're definitely misreading what I wrote, and by the way, given that America has had first pick for the smartest people across the entire world for 100 years, the baseline is much higher than, produces a lot of good research (there has never been a higher IQ gravity well in history). The goal here is to produce amazing research without crippling the middle class with debt and wasting their time so that we have a functioning society that also advances.
Something extremely simple like a 1300-1400 SAT cutoff for university will get us half way there. University being an institution that qualifies for large research grants.
Wealthy parents often hire tutors and consultants to guarantee that their intellectually mediocre children get into those élite schools.
Universities are the epitome of institutional inertia. That is a bad thing.
Not sure why you're getting downvotes; I think this is quite accurate.
They did not mention research which is like the defining characteristic of a university. They seem to be condescendingly grouping research into the category of "status/prestige"
I was thinking of it from what an undergrad is trying to get out of college, graduate+ is an entirely different scene admittedly
Sure but I think it's an oversimplification to say that universities are unfocused and that this lack of focus is a problem because 1) the alternative already exists (smaller colleges are typically focused primarily on education with less research and less sports) 2) Universities doing a lot of things (including offering undergrads connections to research labs) is one of the main reasons that they are an attractive option relative to colleges.
I've heard similar arguments
1) if they were effective then we wouldnt see millions of students jumping into 60k a year private institutions
2) I don't buy this at all, I think students mostly select based on prestige. Academic rigor and research opportunities are mildly correlated to this but def not what high schoolers and their parents index on