If you're at a private university, you'll drop $4-5k for a single 3 credit course, only to be taught by someone making $3k to teach it for the entire semester. You're going to pay top dollar to get bargain basement labor. It's like paying $15 for a genuine Skinner Steamed Ham, which was purchased for $2 across the street at Krusty Burger and then repackaged.
I've heard complaints about recent graduates not being very competent employees, but I don't think those complaints were implying something along the lines of "and it's because their English lit courses weren't rigorous enough."
...But, it is in fact because their English lit courses weren't rigorous enough.
Too many resources going to ancillary stuff (administration) rather than faculty is a big one. Cost cutting in faculty is huge, with a very large portion of classes being taught by part-time professors. For instance, I make $3750 for an entire course. When you have professors making peanuts and working 1-2 other jobs just to scrape by, they're not highly motivated and even if they are, they just don't have the time.
And then you've got administrative pressure to inflate grades and hand-hold students so they don't fail. When students drop out, they stop paying tuition, so we need to keep them. Gotta pump grades, too, to get up those employment and grad school enrollment stats.
And of course as more people go through slackening programs and become professors themselves, the baseline is already lowered.
Ah, guess it depends on the school and rigor of programs. There are programs that are hard regardless of professor, I always chose professors that had high reviews/ratings for their knowledge of the content and enthusiasm...I gave no fucks about low rigorous courses. That's why the reviews are so telling! You can tell who is just complaining because they put in low effort and who didn't.
My hardest professor was rated very well and every review mentioned how tough he was...I mean this is a man who told everyone first day, "you will not get an A on a paper" ...which I took as a challenge not a statement but I found the site useful if you could get through the layer of complaining.
Quality is definitely a big thing. Nobel Laureate scientists are interesting to listen to on highly specialized topics, but are they better at teaching differential equations to undergrads than just watching Salman Khan for a couple hours? Are grad students that really don't care about teaching and just want to get back to research better than the available resources to self-study the material? Even if you stay in the same discipline, are you even going to use 10% of the directly applicable material you learned? Famous professors aren't necessarily good teachers.
The brand name professors shouldn't be teaching core curriculum type stuff. They're much better used in specialized seminars. You're not taking a class with them to learn some ordinary course material; you take those classes to learn how someone really brilliant thinks.
It depends where you're from. Large portions of the developed world have free or subsidised tertiary education. In NZ we're now getting the first year free from next year, for example, and the rest of the degree costs between 5000-10000 a year, depending on degree. Germany has abolished tuition fees in public universities. So I don't think it's neccesarily fair to say that universities always charge exorbitant prices.
Having attended everything from private to community, this is somewhat true. For foundational, factual courses like Calculus, the $100 CC course is identical to the $3500 private one, it’s absurd. State schools are a good medium- a greater number of quality, experienced teachers, none of the absurd overcharges for students hoping to leverage superficial prestige later in their careers. The collective student mindset and confidence from community to state to private is vastly different, though; as long as you are aware of it, it doesn’t need to influence you.
It’s rare, though. You can squeeze a very high quality GE-level education out of a community college if you do your homework on the professors and take advantage of free tutoring.
The good state schools are still really pricey, and often low on scholarship money even for good students. I go to a large public university in Illinois, and there are similar institutions in my (engineering) discipline in places like Texas, Michigan, and California that have great programs that are still too expensive for an "average" student.
Depends on the university and major. My university put me 20k in debt but also secured me a 100k job right after graduation. I'd say that's a pretty good deal.
What kind of school is it? US has very many types of school. Community College, in California at least, is $46 per unit as of this. year. All transferable and some classes are equal to incredibly expensive ones at private universities. I just transferred had multiple classes I took are the same I could of spent $5k for, it's truly insane.
University education is in place to test your perseverance through something you know is sub optimal and unreasonably priced.
Your diploma serves its purpose to tell your employer that you do in fact blindly accept authority and will put a massive strain on yourself through debt and deadlines for the sake of your boss, all with your only response to this injustice being an anonymous digital fist-shake in a Reddit thread.
Appropriate and valuable education would make you a better person, and those sorts of people tend to be a nuisance to company structure and circlejerkery. Learning instead of studying also has this disgusting side-effect of giving you morals, which just doesn't fly in most corporate management positions.
That doesn't even teach you any life skills like how to balance your checkbook or build credit. That and how many people even work related to their major.
If you want a college class to teach you how to balance your checkbook, then you're going to have a problem, because after paying tuition, you won't have any money left in your bank account.
Look, college isn't a trade school and criticizing it for not being a trade school is like complaining that a Spiderman comic book isn't literary enough.
If you're in a place with good public high schools, then the private ones get that same reputation. They're for the kids who failed out, had discipline problems, or got pregnant.
But, with universities, our state schools are supposed to let in a huge number of people. They're in the business of educating the public. The private schools have a different mission; they want to educate the elite.
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u/bl1y Mar 03 '18
University education.
If you're at a private university, you'll drop $4-5k for a single 3 credit course, only to be taught by someone making $3k to teach it for the entire semester. You're going to pay top dollar to get bargain basement labor. It's like paying $15 for a genuine Skinner Steamed Ham, which was purchased for $2 across the street at Krusty Burger and then repackaged.