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An important component of Universities not mentioned, perhaps because it isn’t relevant to the students, is the production of what’s called “basic scientific research” (also known as pure research or fundamental research if you want to google it).
That’s research that is too fundamental and unpredictable to be profitable to companies who are performing for-profit R&D, but that’s results will occasionally lead to the opportunity to do so. Companies only tend to pick up the slack when it comes time to apply basic theory to what is called translational or applied research. But that basic theory needs to exist and be advanced in the first place for translational and applied opportunities to present themselves.
An example being basic research into quantum theory leading the way to the for-profit R&D that takes place regarding transistor miniaturization. If the fundamental understanding of quantum mechanics wasn’t there, the companies wouldn’t have known where to “start,” and yet the pursuit of that basic research is inherently unprofitable due to unpredictable outcomes re: when and where practical usefulness will present itself.
Of course, you need warm bodies to do this research, whether in a physics lab or in an economics department (in which “basic” research also takes place, just of a different nature). For institutions like Harvard, for which only 3% of their income is tuition, it’s looking increasingly likely that tuition may be waived entirely in the future as the benefit of those “warm bodies” outweighs what is an increasingly negligible line item on the income statement.
I was so confused how this isn't a main point being mentioned. But then again, most of these types of arguments against higher education come from people who have no clue about research in general. A vast majority of scientific advancement of the human race are because of Universities.
I think it’s just that economists tend to look at everything through the lens of economics. And, most economists are microeconomists. You have to really zoom out to the macro in order to see the societal benefits of basic research.
Well hold on there. Ok yes there are social benefits as a whole absolutely from research. Not denying that at all. But what about the students who are paying their own money and going into massive debt going to those schools. What are they there for? The problem with research is academia stops becoming about education entirely and starts becoming a non profit R+D facility using not-quite adult labor?
All research in Universities is free to the students. The % of folks who PAY to do a PhD is in the US. This is due to the funding structure of the funding agencies that support this research.
The people performing research are overwhelmingly those with PhDs, who are payed by the university, or PhD students, who are most often funded (paid, albeit little, by the university). Undergrads ( whom I assume you are referring to as not quite adults) don't really do any of the intellectual leg work for research. They may help in a lab in their later years, but generally research is performed by adults who are paid.
Because Scott is a grifter, that plays on the narrative of "We fucked our kids" and "Look how fucked our kids are nowadays." He cares about folks buying his books, speaking engagements etc. Not about the truth.
can you explain what you mean by 'vast majority'? Because not sure I'd agree. Agriculture and military dominated for 1000's of years. Universities have been important in many building blocks - but 1 university building block led to 1000's of non-university advancements based on one that one block. National labs have also provided tons of advancements. And university researchers are often just executing the work of businesses or government. That's why profs spend their time writing grant applications. They're a key cog in the system, but not a vast majority.
They are affiliated with Universities.
This is how they get money for research. Check NSF, NIH, NEH. The government sets the framework; the researchers send proposals, they get funded based on the quality of the proposal, provenance, and relevance to what the government wants to do, and they do research.
Because it’s pretty much completely unproven? It’s a theory, but impossible to test the counter factual.
This is exactly right. Treating students as the “customers” is completely missing the point of major Universities.
To be fair, as the writer of the comment you replied to, undergraduates are the most customer-like of the student population. It’s mostly grad students that are contributing to research — and that’s why their tuition is already mostly negligible in most cases (ex. Via grants and/or by being a TA or RA — MBAs, Law, and Medicine being the big exceptions). Undergrads are essentially purchasing a reputation-based stamp of approval towards their academic or professional usefulness.
But the fact remains that all grad students have to have gone through undergrad as a pre-requisite before they become useful — hence the argument that all students should be tuition-free in the universities-as-a-source-of-research model.
Lincoln freed the slaves, but not the grad students.
I see where you’re coming from, but I just disagree with framing any group as “customers” or even “customer-like”. If undergrads attend a major research university, they should understand that the faculty’s primary objective is to create new knowledge that may benefit society. Yes, they can receive an education, but to me, this is part of faculty fulfilling their duties in creating new knowledge: they must disseminate it. It is not providing customers with the product they paid for. Yes, students pay to participate (far too much in most cases), but I think this could be rationalized as some type of tax on those who will receive a leg-up professionally because of their participation in the process.
In a perfect world, students would not pay a cent.
I know I’m on soap box here, and that we probably agree 99.9%.
That’s true! You could certainly frame it as universities providing undergrads with the “fundamental” knowledge to which companies then pick up the slack with the “applied” knowledge on top of that.
Of course, the implication would then be that corporate taxes should maybe contribute towards undergraduate education… which I don’t think will be an easy sell in this country at least haha.
I think we agree that the point of education is eventually research.
Learning new things is the most important thing we do as a species. Both for its own sake and for the sake of the new things we can build.
The question that we are asking today, I would hope, is have the system's of the past maximized our outcomes?
In Ireland, all uni places are free. You compete out of high school and the top x% or whatever the governments budget allows, get to pursue the thinking careers. This comes with an element of social prestige and economic opportunity that isn't available to the bottom 70%. Call it an intelligentsia and the mechanism is a standardized test out of high school.
It seems like the ivey leagues do the same thing but privately. They recruit the wealthiest and brightest and ensure that their bright sparks have economic opportunity into the future and capitalize on the outcomes. Their intelligentsia are invited into the ownership class. Fused with the capital class and tuition price is the mechanism.
So, is there scarcity of opportunity? Is learning and research a zero sum game? I have always believed that when we move to four days a week, the fifth should involve a day at the makerspace where we all pursue our Google 10% projects.
Who controls it, is probably less important, in the long run than what we produce.
The point of education is eventually research? No man. It's jobs, prestige, a network to meet people, etc. it's parties and even gyms with lazy rivers. I have a doctorate from a big ten uni and I understand what you're saying. As an undergrad and even masters student, no way. It was high school. Producing an original thought is shocking. Designing a test to prove it, and actually getting results is so far beyond what college is about that it's like red pill blue pill bullshit. Cliched, I know.
Fari enough. So what system or change to the system would have maximized your output?
My doc program is 16 in the country and they know what they're doing. Having a bunch of test barriers and cut scores is bullshit. For people like me, it's about real life results. So if someone puts numbers on the board, like they actually produce (I'm not a bro, far from it), it's important they stay in the program even if they're difficult. School matters less and real life application with improvements to an organization are what matter to me. A huge dose of theory and practical applications are really important, imo. Then we should write our dissertations. There's no writing, in my opinion, untill we've done the work and produced results. My biz is organizational change. This would not work for other industries.
Scott Galloway (NYU professor at the Stern School of Business) makes a compelling argument about what universities are for in his TED Talk.
(Quotes may be out of order.)
I tend to agree. The purpose of higher education is to find the people that can be engineers, doctors and nurses, lawyers, teachers, historians, etc, and get them into those roles. Especially if they're from a family or community that's too poor to get them there on their own.
A university education should not be a luxury for the rich. Because rich kids get to be whatever they want anyway. It's the smart kids trapped working in sweatshops or bailing hay or canning fish that need accessible higher education so they can stop wasting their potential and start using it for everyone's benefit.
We need more educated professionals to meet society's needs. We have the people. We have the resources. The only question is how to make those resources available to the people. And right now the biggest barrier is the greed of the rich siphoning those resources off for personal gain.
I am one of those people and this has absolutely been my experience with higher education. I did not graduate from high school but I did get my GED. Nonetheless, I graduated with my bachelor's in mathematics this spring semester and I'm pursuing graduate school so that I can hopefully become a professional (applied) mathematician. This career path otherwise absolutely would not have been possible for me without community college and the small state university that I attended.
See, state universities are great for this purpose. These are the schools where the vast majority of working professionals are borne out of, not the elite institutions that the lower and middle class can't afford or have the credentials to attend.
Holy shit, this is kinda wild. I was about to make a comment similar to yours, because that's extremely similar to what happened to me. Starting my PhD in the fall.
Same. GED, BS Engineering, MBA (STEM). Higher ed changed my life. Now my kids are the 10% and will go to an elite school where they will drop out to become djs. The circle of life...
I didn't get into any of the Ph.D. programs I applied to unfortunately. That's okay though. I'm going to do my masters(thesis option) at the institution I received my bachelors at and then try again. I was already on a waitlist for a couple of schools but I think not having research experience is what held me back the most.
What areas of math are you interested in particularly? I am interested in nonlinear dynamics, continuum modelling, and asymptotics.
Damn, sorry you didn't get in, but going for a masters sounds like a solid option that will massively help; I got a masters in statistics a couple years back after finishing my math BS, and I think that helped a lot. Just don't stop trying; it's a secret weapon for those of us with complicated academic histories :)
I've got some time to figure it out, but right now I'm leaning towards something in analysis (maybe functional or harmonic) or dynamical systems, but I've got a pretty solid background in probability so I'm eyeballing stochastic differential equations as well. Mathematical physics seems really interesting too, but I actually don't know shit about physics, so I'm a lot more tentative about going in that direction lol.
unfortunately state schools are also victims of tuition creep, possibly more so since lots of their traditional funding sources have disappeared over the last several decades
Seems a full half of the political will in this country wants to drag the rest back to the 1800's. Against scientific understanding, against medical advances, against any change whatsoever that deviates from their very specific conclusions borne out of a translation of a translation of a very old book.
Why have science when we can return to the days of 40% infant mortality?
My experience with small state schools and community colleges is that most instructors are checked out and unavailable for helping individual students navigate a path into a career, and there's no discussion at a larger scale like with career workshops or classes. Or even how to get to grad school, how it's paid for, how applications work, how internships work, being willing to provide references, etc.
I completely agree.
Political economist and academic Mark Blyth made a similar point here when asked how he went from growing up in poverty in a broken home in Scotland to becoming a tenured Ivy League professor:
Can you cite that Scott Galloway speech, I'd like to read or watch it.
Here you go: https://youtu.be/qEJ4hkpQW8E?si=lepd-Pssqt60HQSo
It's linked in the first sentence of the comment.
higher ed is about taking intelligent people and giving them the skillset and network to amplify their potential. it's also about wasting money and time thinking you can reap the benefits without meeting the entry criteria
It seems like this, and a lot of the national media discourse on universities, is skewed towards the NYUs and Harvards of the country. I get it, the types of people who get op-eds in national publications and give Ted Talks went to those schools, but it is so atypical of the median college student in the US. The type of school he’s describing exists, lots of them, they’re the state universities, especially the non-flagship ones.
Yeah. I’ve seen this TedTalk praised so many times but I thought a lot of what he was saying is very different from what’s actually happening to the US college system as a whole.
It’s kind of a top down problem. Basically the top schools have such massive endowments, they could probably work to expand their enrollment through partnerships with other schools. Not to mention that they could cut costs dramatically. If Harvard is such an elite university, then I’m sure through a partnership, they could help some no-name school in the Midwest develop a program and use their brand. But they won’t because they like that it makes them special and a part of a small club.
He’s just another grifter.
No they don't. Truly. I speak from experience. I was a first generation college student that grew up below the poverty line and worked my ass off to get an engineering degree at a state university.
Nothing about that experience was what he's describing. I watched a dozen brilliant peers drop out over financial problems. I had to constantly grind scholarship and grant applications while holding down a 4.0 in electrical engineering, a full time job, and pick up as many extracurriculars as I could handle without ending up hospitalized from exhaustion because they boost your chances of being selected for financial support.
It was soul crushing working that hard and watching wealthier nepo babies party it up the entire time. Knowing that even after graduating, even though I performed orders of magnitude better than them, I was destined to start at the ground floor and they were destined to jump several levels right off the bat because of mommy and daddy.
Mediocre state schools still cost thousands and thousands of dollars per semester. That does not save any reasonable number of smart working class kids from wasting their lives doing manual labor. I know dozens of such people. Hell, my whole family is every bit as smart and hard working as me, but I'm the only one that made it to college because I was the only one willing to be homeless for a while to make it happen.
I don't think the existence of students with rich parents at your university negates the fact that people like yourself were able to make it within the current education system. I have a very similar story to yours and I did mechanical engineering, and many of my peers share a similar story, and we all were accepted to university and are doing fine in our careers (among those of us who pursued engineering). My university, the University of Houston, really didn't have any sort of party-scene or large group of students who were "nepo-babies". We were a large university where the vast majority of students lived off campus to save money, many of the students worked at least part-time, and we had an extremely high percentage of immigrant and minority students. Coming from a well-off family was the exception, not the norm, at my university. This is a very different picture than what the speaker you've quoted was representing. Most schools don't resemble Harvard, and education is more accessible than it's ever been before in the history of our country (with the caveat that immediate college enrollment post highschool dipped very recently because of COVID). For factual data to back this up, you can see college enrollment rates vs. time which clearly shows the accessibility of higher education is a new phenomenon rather than something that used to exist that's now gone: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_302.10.asp (look at column 1 vs. column 5).
Here's the thing. Generational effort and success either have value, or they don't. You underwent extraordinary hardship to achieve extraordinary success (rising from a family below the poverty line to what you have achieved, and will continue to achieve in the future, is exceptional - I know, because I've done it myself). However, its also what someone else's family did a generation or two ago. If you haven't yet, you will almost certainly join the self-made millionaire club (which the majority of millionaires in the U.S. are a member of).
When you do, you'll want to provide your kids a head start in life, because at some point, you realize that you already have everything you need, and are no longer working to secure your own future, but that of your family. You will want them to work hard, but not necessarily "soul-crushingly" hard.
If we want every generation to start afresh under extreme struggle, what's the point of success in the 1st place? Achieving success must include being able to give an easier life to our family, or it's pretty meaningless.
Ah, the system is working exactly as intended. Great to see. 👍
I think this really is ignorant to the value that those other subject matter provide. A well rounded education provides engineers with a greater skill set to contribute to society.
Spoken as a person who is exactly who this article is talking about. I was the smart kid working a dead end warehouse job before getting into engineering and science.
This is the most amazing thing I've read in a long time
His statements about the goals of his colleagues in higher education being drunk on luxury and driven by increasing compensation while reducing accountability may be true for some academic departments and many if not all of the bureaucrats, but I can assure you that is not the case for most academics.
My parents were both professors having just retired recently after getting fed up with the way schools have changed, and I have several friends in PhD programs and working as postdocs. It’s generally not glamorous or well paid at all. The ratio of pay going to instructors and researchers compared to administrative staff has gone down. There are more and more low paid, no/low benefit adjunct positions compared to tenure track ones. There’s been a huge increase in the amount of administrative work that academic staff are tasked with on top of their teaching, researching, writing, etc responsibilities.
Thats all to say: it’s not the academic staff that’s getting the benefit of these huge tuition cost increases in general. The idea that academic staff are basking in luxury and don’t have much to do is pretty preposterous, to be quite honest. This is less true for business schools like Mr Galloway works in, so that may be why.
Really, it’s a huge increase in the number and compensation of administrative staff along with university over-investment in luxurious facilities and amenities to try and lure students.
Harvard is not a typical university, at all, and should not be used to generalize about "higher education" as a whole. It is a freakishly wealthy outlier. Their financial resources are nearly inexhaustible. Their pool of applicants is deep. Increasing their enrollment numbers by 4% is trivially easy. That is not the case for the vast majority of colleges and universities.
Most colleges and universities are operating under very tight budgets, limited classroom and lab space, and declining numbers of applying students. If they could increase their enrollment numbers, believe me, they would. They are desperately competing for a shrinking number of students. The idea that they are limiting enrollment, on purpose, is absurd.
It is guaranteed that even in the best possible scenario, 8 out of every 9 (88% of them) will FAIL. It's basic mathematics. We can't all be in the top 10%. It doesn't work that way.
Life is easier for the middle 50% in this generation than it was for the top 10% 50 years ago. That is how this works, and is working. Progress does not stop.
Scott Galloway is the pseudo intellectual dork that wanted more school lockdowns and then wanted to be shown grace when he was faced with how wrong he was.
Utilize All Gifts
This is a good article but I was actually hoping it would address a different issue, which is that universities are now expected to be job training facilities instead of providing mind-broadening education. Universities were never supposed to be preparing young people for jobs, they were supposed to be providing education and teaching people how to think. But now that a degree costs almost as much as a house, and now that college has become an expectation for the middle class who doesn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to waste on the luxury of education for its own sake, well…what is it for, exactly?
All universities have mind broadening content. In fact most of the classes probably fall under that concept to some degree.
But if students are paying six figures for an education, their expectation to be able to prep and find a good job afterwards is completely reasonable.
From my experience as a social science major at a research university, I did not feel I got any prep for a job. Everything was focused on research or mind broadening and you had to fend for yourself if you wanted to figure out how your degrees could get you something in the private sector.
(If anyone is reading my comment and thinks I only responded to OP and did not read the article, I did indeed read the article. There just isn’t much to debate in my opinion on what the piece was written about.)
I studied ecological science, and we had one course where we touched wildlife tools, another where we did programming, and the microbiology course and the chemistries (O-chem & P-chem) were largely practical. There was a special variance in the handbook that allowed us to eliminate a physical exercise class series (3-courses) for these. We just had to prove that we could swim.
Otherwise, it was 100% about “why as opposed to how did researchers do …wolves in Yosemite, deer into middle Tennessee, various aquatic population and community studies….”
And my degree in accounting seemed altogether focused on getting a job and a CPA license. YMMV
My degree in engineering, too.
I took a humanities undergrad degree and masters at a research-focused university, and similarly it didn’t prep me for the job market in the slightest, but my observation is that this has changed fairly dramatically over the past 20 years. Many universities are now clearer on their responsibilities to prepare undergrads for the job market, and use graduate employability as a significant marketing differentiator
That’s just not what college is good for. The main things that matter for getting a job—once you meet the minimum requirements—are experience and connections. You have to forge both of those yourself if you want to succeed after college. Even engineers don’t sleepwalk through majors and come out the other side with highly-paid positions.
You see this mindset a lot when it comes to Computer Science. A lot of people are shocked that a theoretical degree doesn’t cover all the latest technologies. Which is a shame (for those people), because a degree like that sets you up to be able to learn any new technology.
My dad was a programmer for his whole career before retirement and he complained a lot about new CS grads coming in for interviews. He said the biggest thing they struggled with was providing examples of programs they had actually written.
This really gets at an issue wider than universities, which is are we creating a society that values growth of the human and the human species, or profit for profit's sake as the end-goal of advancement. Are we progressing to profit, or are we progressing to allow us to focus more, for free, on expanding our minds and understanding of the universe and ourselves?
Obviously the former but most people seem to be ok with that
“The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” - JLP
those are the words of someone who has never had to live paycheck to paycheck. The reality for the vast majority of people, is that wealth isn't even an option, and survival is a barely attainable goal. Worrying about something as abstract as "humanity" is so far out of reach for most people that it's not even something they think about.
I agree with you. They’re the words of a fictional character living in the 24th century.
I believe the problem is jobs are expected to train you and university is to expand your mind but neither is a good judge for what career what person should do in the long run. Things were easier 100 years ago. Now there are too many niche jobs.
I just saw a recently-posted MSNBC video on this exact topic. Part of what they said was the issue is that employee turnover rates are high, and companies tend to promote externally rather than from within or often put a degree requirement to be above a low-level managerial position (my current employer requires a BA of business or related field to become a District Manager, but they don’t require actual experience, so a Store Manager of 10+ years experience working at that company couldn’t be a DM, but a college grad with a BA in Business Management who never worked a day in their life could). So, of course, why should employees be loyal to their employer?
This problem leads into a positive feedback loop, wherein the companies don’t want to put forth the effort to train higher-paying individuals, so they just raise the requirements for those positions so only external applicants at that present level can apply while employees see zero reason to stay at their company when they’ve reached their pay/position cap.
I’ve applied for so many “entry level” jobs in my field that want a BA and years of experience. I ended up realizing I’d make more money staying in retail working my way up the managerial chain until I’m at my cap than I would doing any job in my field, despite having international internships and publications under my belt.
The phenomenon you're experiencing and describing is endemic to retail (which I did roughly six years in) and not at all applicable to professional fields I've experience in (accounting and consulting)
Fwiw (idk honestly that it's much) but I thought I'd throw in my vaguely applicable 2c
I agree with you. I’m in the professional fields and an MBA or any of that garbage isn’t needed.
What I don’t understand is why retail would require any of that stuff. Retail isn’t hard. It’s not rocket science. Anyone with some sense of logic can be good at retail. Employers should stop looking at all the letters someone has after their name and actually talk to the person and evaluate if they can think critically. Then hire that person, because they will learn the details of the company and job and then actually do their job well.
It’s definitely a thing in professional fields too. In software development, companies don’t like investing in employees who will leave after a couple years.
Jobs don't train you - at least, not anymore. If you're a company that operates some niche software or hardware, you put an expectation of "X years of experience" with that system and let the labor market sort out who applies. When job postings are free to post online for nationwide -if not global - audiences to view, you don't have to take whatever you get like you would with a local newspaper ad or job fair.
And as such, a degree on its own does not guarantee you a job like it did before. You need some combination of internships, relevant work experiences, and projects in order to be anywhere close to competitive. The onus is on individuals to bolster themselves on their own, independently from their studies.
But paradoxically, THAT'S where universities seem to be useful: they offer inroads and opportunities for future job candidates to gain new experiences. Classes offer project opportunities. Internships favor current students. Some colleges work with companies on developing co-ops and hackathons. Student clubs and orgs develop networking groups, and unite students around niche skills and interest areas.
Jobs don’t train you because turnover is high. If you spend resources training someone, then another company can spend those same resources offering those people a higher salary once they are trained.
It’s a vicious cycle. Less employer loyalty turns into less employee loyalty and repeat.
One option would be for companies to have training bonds, but that is not popular with most.
The issue is that companies think they can pay people in training. People are there to make money. Once they are trained up, they expect better pay. The company that did the training thinks they deserve loyalty and the worker willing to do the new job at lower pay because the worker should be grateful for training. But the employee only did training to get better pay. The company has to train and then pay more after successful training.
Short term managers think they can skip the money spent training by just hiring at the better pay level, but long term that means people with better training become hard to find and cost even more money.
Erm, the whole point was that there's a substantial amount of goal ambiguity today. Fwiw that debate college as vocational training vs academic foundation is and example of what the author was describing.
Ah, I’m glad someone said it. A lot of people have forgotten what universities were made for, which is, academia.
Are they? I am admittedly a bit removed from my university days (2015 graduate) but I certainly did not attend a job training facility. I received a traditional education- which provided me with the ability to go out and convince employers to offer me internships, which led to a full time career.
Is this not what happens anymore?