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ks2048
jasode
>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it.
> I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
People have been using "democratize" to describe "more accessible to the masses" for a long time. Here's an example from 106 years ago in 1920 :
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Soviet_Russia/qflaAAAAM...
And 40 years ago a 1986 article of "microchip democratizing computing" : https://www.google.com/books/edition/Procom_s_1986_1987_Dent...
The additional meanings of democratize to describe "more accessible" are also documented in Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic#:~:tex...
1vuio0pswjnm7
It could be that HN commnter replying to submission about education in the United States indicating that he is "irked" by the term "democratisation" is not located within the United States but rather in a non-English speaking country not initiallu founded upon "democratic" principles (cf. United States) and with a dissimilar history of "democracy". As such, his interpetation of this term could have different meaning to him than the journalist working for The Atlantic who resides within the United States and is employed by one of its academic institutions
ben_w
Indeed. Like ks2048 I find the use of "democratize" outisde of governance to be bizzare and even annoying.
I am British by birth, and IIRC Hacker News is pretty much the only place I see "democratize" used to mean "make more widely available".
1vuio0pswjnm7
*initially
potsandpans
Right. But it's not my favorite nerd snipe interpretation that allows me to post low effort comments on hackernews about the headline instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion about the article.
Amorymeltzer
I basically agree, but I think at this point it's an accepted use; see e.g. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_knowledge> and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratization_of_technology>. Indeed, wiktionary (<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/democratization>) uses your sense as the first, strict definition, but gives "The broadening of access to something, especially for the sake of egalitarianism." as the loose definition.
caconym_
"Democratize"? I thought that was when you rent an AI tool built on stolen intellectual property to write, draw, code, etc. for you because you never bothered to learn those skills yourself and convinced yourself they were being gatekept.
pandaman
>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it
It literally does, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic
3: relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people
PearlRiver
I do not know how it worked in the US but in my country until the 1960s university was for the upper class.
No son or daughter of a butcher could ever hope to study law.
tracker1
It really changed during the Clinton administration, where rules were established for student loans that pretty much ensured almost anyone who wanted to go to college could go to college. Since then tuition rates have dramatically exceeded inflation though. There's also the issue in that a lot of private/commercial colleges have optimized their pricing to where most people drop out to extract maximum value from the system, pretty much leaving people often unable to complete their programs the final year or half year.
I think that the opportunity for funding should have higher ties to economic demand for certain degree programs over others. I'm not opposed to people that want to go to arts programs in college, but I'm not sure that they should be taxpayer funded necessarily.
I have thought that areas where we bring in foreign workers should largely be offset with higher employer taxes and those taxes funding grants for domestic study into the fields in question. I also think we need a much broader set of trade schools for more industries than typical. Even with technology and programming.
In terms of lower high school graduation rates, I think we've dumbed down and taken things to the lowest common denominator in an extreme fashion. Common-core has failed, along with "new math" and other more modern teaching methods. My great grandmother was a teacher, and I've seen some of the text books they used in the pre-1960s, the coverage was much more thorough and difficult even at a 5th grade level than what many kids today see through the end of high school.
There should be plenty of room for vocational study as well as traditional study... but we need to stop just giving kids a pass because they're a certain age when they don't understand the core curriculem.
pandaman
It might have been the same until 1960s in the US. It doesn't matter in 2020s, when people who graduated before 1960s are in their 80s if still alive.
FrustratedMonky
Isn't more people attending college, and thus choosing where to go with their pocket book, the 'control'.
The people control, through voting by choosing where to attend, based on what is offered. So if someplace is not offering much that anybody wants, they don't get students, and go out of business.
The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
Not that I agree that money should control learning. I'd like to go back to more hardcore reading/writing/arithmetic/Compiler Design. But nobody digs that.
ks2048
> The word 'democratize' is often used just for 'access' through purchasing power.
I guess I'm saying, yes, that is how it often used. I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word.
In the 90's when Linux was taking off, did people say Torvalds has "democratized Unix"? (honest question - I'm not sure.)
atq2119
It's a fairly weak level of control, though.
Compare with the governing structures of public universities in (most of?) Germany where there is a "senate" composed of elected representatives of professors, students, and administrative and academic staff. Now that is approaching democratic control.
bananamogul
Just wait until you realize that 99.999% of the time, when people say "methodology" they really mean "method". It'll drive you mad.
seniorThrowaway
I think college's value proposition and entire model has been eroded. Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years). AI probably has a lot to do with that, but it's exposing something more fundamental. CS wasn't supposed to be a programming boot camp anyway, it is at its heart an academic degree much close to pure mathematics than programming. Maybe it should go back to that? Maybe college never should have been for everyone? That was the norm for the vast majority of the existence of higher education. Maybe we don't need gleaming campus' with huge facilities overhead costs? When storing knowledge required physical books it made sense to build learning facilities around large libraries, but that hasn't been the case for decades now. Should young people really be taking on life long non-dischargeable debt for a glorified high school diploma? I think the answer is no, they shouldn't, and that the entire college bubble needs to be popped.
Aurornis
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate (I don't have the primary source on this, but it is published by a site I read that never fudges these kinds of things, going back many years).
I think you may have misread something. 11% is closer to the unemployment or underemployment rate for recent grads, not the employment rate.
There may have been a short window during the intense layoffs where you could have looked at a specific graduation cohort and found a low rate of job placement at time of graduation, but that’s a very different statistic. Many take time off after graduation, travel, choose to go to grad school, or just don’t start job searching in earnest until after graduation.
Gagarin1917
Jee I wish OP would have linked the source instead of just… alluding to it and promising that it’s reliable.
“… a site I read…” Lol
dmoy
In 2024 is 74%, not 11%
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
That is, 7% are unemployed, and 19% aren't able to find comp sci jobs.
I suspect it's worse now, but probably not 11%?
Dunsinagb
[dead]
rootusrootus
> Major school's CS grads are finding jobs upon graduation at an 11% rate
That number makes me very skeptical, even in 2026. Maybe what you are saying is that the unemployment figure is 11%? That would be pretty bad compared to two years ago, but within the realm of plausible if we were seeing a major upset in the employment market.
E.g. 2024 data: https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...
mcmcmc
I'd interpret that as 11% of CS grads are finding appropriate jobs (not underemployment) within a set amount of time after graduation. That data from the fed includes all people aged 22-27 with a bachelor's degree.
Where that number is coming from, or what that time frame would be I'm not sure. But I do think it would be more interesting to see the amount of time recent grads spent unemployed or underemployed vs a presumptive snapshot of current employment state.
ryandrake
That's the way I interpreted it, too. A CS grad working at Home Depot stocking shelves or an accounting grad working at Starbucks would not count toward unemployment figures, but it's probably not what anyone would consider a properly-employed college graduate.
Sample size of <10, but a lot of my friends are at the age where their kids are graduating from undergrad recently, and pretty much zero of them are working in their field, and many are struggling to find anything at all, even retail or bartending.
computably
The census data you linked lists unemployment and underemployment for graduates aged 22-27. Assuming nontraditional graduates are a relatively small minority, that's a 5 year window after graduation.
I would find it believable, though not interesting, for only 11% of CS grads to have a local-median-pay, CS-related job locked in at graduation.
Ancalagon
defunding education systems strikes again
jltsiren
The model has not really eroded. It just became more obvious that some people had assumptions that were always wrong.
In some circles, it was popular to assume that academic degrees are supposed to be job training instead of education. And then that got interpreted narrowly as the skills you need in your first job after graduation. But a full career is 40+ years. Even when the job market was not changing as quickly as now, nobody could predict the skills you would need 20 years later. If you bought that viewpoint, you spent years preparing for the first few years of your career, which was obviously wasteful.
The actual value proposition was already stated 200+ years ago:
> There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...
Of course, colleges can be made more cost-effective by focusing more narrowly on education. For some reason, American higher education ended up being weirdly collectivist in an otherwise individualist culture. The ideal college experience became a separate stage of life between childhood and adulthood. You live on a campus outside the real world, and that campus is located in a place few people would otherwise move to. The incentives got weird, and colleges started prioritizing aspects of the college experience that are not directly related to education.
onlyrealcuzzo
The idea that the AVERAGE person should spend 4 years BOTH not working AND incurring massive amounts of (non-defaultable) debt is bananas.
College either needs to be 1) way cheaper, 2) mainly for the state-subsidized exceptional and independently wealthy, or 3) move to a different model.
We have too many colleges LARPing as Harvard, and too few colleges even attempting to be affordable, practical, or actually deliver value to the ordinary person.
bashtoni
Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all. Humanities subjects are just as valid a topic of study as STEM.
A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements, now most people think you are crazy for suggesting such a thing. I think you can trace a lot of the problems in the western world back to this.
onlyrealcuzzo
Lots of things benefit society and don't cost $40k per year per person in subsidies - mainly to the upper middle class.
gottorf
> Higher education improves society as a whole. It should be paid for from general taxation, and available to all
> A couple of generations ago these were uncontroversial statements
I don't believe those strong assertions you're making were uncontroversial at any time, and are likely objectively less true now than they were in the past.
triceratops
You're both right. College is beneficial to society. And it costs way too much to deliver right now.
You could copy-paste these statements to describe American healthcare vs European healthcare and get a very different reaction. Even though it's true for that field too.
Why the actual fuck does a humanities degree cost anywhere near as much as an engineering degree? Literally all you need is some professors and a space to teach in. You could run them in co-working spaces, parks (weather permitting), or coffee shops ffs, with no administrative staff or other bloat. (For real: small seminars in a coffee shop or a public park would be dope)
Education is beneficial to society and making it cheaper makes it more widely accessible. You and the person you responded to actually agree on a lot.
tracker1
There have been several attempts to raise the bar for Community Colleges to offer Bachelors programs... the existing universities and entrenched professional programs have fought it tooth and nail.
My daughter got her associates carrying no debt... but has struggled to get into an appropriate higher level program. She's currently working PT in two jobs, one as a prep cook in a high end eatery and as a park associate at the local zoo. Neither is offering a particularly compelling pay or benefits that most jobs should offer IMO.
I'm with you on college though, in terms of there should be way cheaper options all around... I think there should even be grant programs for better vocational/trade programs as an alternative path for Bachelors class degrees.
JumpCrisscross
Waterloo University sort of nails the balance with their focus on constant, paid internships.
mcmcmc
So community colleges?
nebula8804
God I wish community college would be subsidized. Some states now cover it for your first degree which is a great start and some also are now starting to subsidize courses for retirees but man I would so love to just go and do like random courses I have no intention of pursuing a career in.
European universities are not resorts like in the US and community college keep that small footprint mentality as well. They have done it right. Focus on the education and keep costs lower. I have friends in Europe that work for a few years then just take time off and study something that interests them in their subsidized universities and I am so jealous because their costs are so low.
When I went to community college (and then university) there were a few moments where I actually wasn't treading water in my CS degree and I was able to take a wide variety of classes. They were some of the happiest moments of my life.
Recently visited LA and walked around LACC during the evening. The campus is enormous (and famously was the scene for the TV show Community). I just thought of the enormous variety of subjects being taught, imagine if that was accessible to anyone when they desired.
MiguelX413
That's absolutely not the point of higher education, don't drag it down to the level of industry please.
traderj0e
I view it as an arms race. We even went beyond college degrees being common. Now it's fairly common to also do grad school and other resumé-padding. Yeah that means more learning, but there's also a big zero-sum aspect to this.
Specific example is medical school/residency. To "DMZ" this, they'd need to ignore anything students do during gap years, ignore research too unless it's an MD-PhD program. Everyone should be going straight through unless some personal challenge forces them to delay.
I don't look to CS as an example because it's an unusual bubble on top of all that. CS degrees also became super competitive and subsequently worthless around 2000.
dylan604
> Maybe college never should have been for everyone?
This is my sentiment. School counselors pushed everyone to colleges, but actively dissed trade schools. Forcing students to take classes in subjects they absolutely do not care about is a terrible idea for a secondary education track. If someone really just wants to learn a trade and have a nice life, there is nothing wrong with that.
Did CS course really just become coding boot camps? That seems like an insult to CS grads that came before. That's not a diss to boot camp attendees, but CS grad learns way more than how to code a specific language. However, if someone wants to just code, there's nothing wrong with that. Not everyone is interested in knowing how a CPU works or how much L2 cache improves anything. There's plenty of code that can be written with GC languages so that the coder never even has to think about any of the underpinnings of the system. There's other code that'll never work like that and requires more lower level understanding. There's plenty of work to share
nebula8804
In 2024, 42.8% of the population ages 25 to 39, 41.5% ages 40 to 54, and 34.2% age 55 and older held a bachelor’s degree or higher.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/educatio...
That does not seem like everyone is going to college.
gottorf
"Everyone" is hyperbole, of course. But it's already too high a number.
Spooky23
Well yeah, trades suck ass. There are alot of dudes in cushy well paid office gigs extolling the virtues of trade work.
It wasn’t some awful conspiracy, physical trade jobs are hard work and with no pensions or benefit protection, there’s a lot of guys struggling when their bodies are broken at 40. In the 80s, most urban trades were unionized with benefit funds etc. Not the case in 2026.
dylan604
And a bunch of tech peeps are overweight physically out of shape with other health effects as bad as what you're saying about trades. Humans get old.
I know plenty of trades people that do hard work and think cushy office gigs are hell on earth and that type of work sucks ass. Just because it's not your preferred career doesn't mean you should denigrate those that do. Besides, if there were no trades, you'd have no place to live, you'd have no food to eat, you'd have no car to drive, and you'd have no internet as who was going to build that infrastructure?
bix6
Quick search shows around 6% unemployment for CS grads. Where is your number from? That is massively different.
floxy
Anyone have the stats for how the enrollment trends have been for CS programs at universities? Has there been a noticeable drop-off, potentially due to concerns of AI reducing/eliminating entry-level/junior roles? I suppose there would be some lag, since if you've been planning most of your high school career to get a CS degree, there is inertia in changing majors and applying to different universities. And now that we're mid-April, I'd even think the data for the incoming freshman would be pretty close at a 90% confidence level for the upcoming 2026/2027 academic year.
clusterhacks
Check out the Taulbee survey results:
"In 2023–24, Bachelor’s degree production fell 5.5% compared to the previous year across CS, CE, and I departments. Among departments reporting both years, the decrease was 4.3%. Despite this drop, production remains well above pre-pandemic levels and reflects continued strength following the post-2020 rebound. CS saw a 7.4% decrease and CE a 13.3% decrease."
But it also looks like enrollment in CS programs increased in 2024/2025:
"U.S. CS departments reported an increase in new majors per department of 12.8%"
https://datavisualization.cra.org/TaulbeeSurvey/CRA_Taulbee_Survey_Report_2024.html#Bachelor%E2%80%99s_Program_Production_and_Enrollmentsbtreecat
I think we need more Software Engineers, and fewer Computer Scientists.
IME, CS as a profession, doesn't need to concern itself with maintenance, secure coding practices, administration, system implementation, etc. There's no class called "maintaining this POS code base from 10 years ago."
CS folk fail when they don't make the top of a leader board for sorting algos.
Software Engineers fail if they tell you that maintenance requires 10 manual touch points over a weekend.
Different concerns. While software engineering is built upon CS fundamentals, ultimately your concern is with what's coming years down the line when your unpatched "hack week" project is underpinning the business model.
brd529
Isn’t there a strong argument that we put too many students in debt with a partially completed or useless degree in a well meaning push for “college for all”? The triumph the author describes - an increase in colleges - came at the expense of a reduction in vocational schools and programs.
zdragnar
Nearly half of college graduates age 22-27 are underemployed (i.e. such that bachelors degrees have jobs that only require a high school diploma or less):
According to https://archive.is/Gyl7y the usual suspects do poorly, such as performance arts, but also things like criminal justice, environmental studies and many of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
People trot out the "college grads earn more" lines ad nauseum but the numbers haven't been looking good for that argument for years.
rootusrootus
> all of the STEM majors are near or over the 50% mark as well.
I am not seeing that? Computer Science, to use an easy example, is 19.1% underemployed. Bad, but not 50%. Even restricted to 'recent graduates' it does not look that grim? If I'm misreading the data, please correct me. I have kids approaching the age where they will be considering post-secondary choices so I am trying to keep an eye on things.
zdragnar
Edit: apologies, I just noticed my original comment said "all" instead of "many". That definitely isn't case as you noted.
Original: Animal and plant sciences: 53%
Biochem: 42
Biology: 51
Chemistry: 42
Engineering technologies: 44
Medical technician: 47
Miscellaneous Biological Science: 47
Miscellaneous Technologies: 49
Those were the ones that caught my eye. I'm assuming the "miscellaneous" categories are for higher degrees in very niche or specific sub fields.
STEM covers all of science, math and tech outside of medicine/ health care, so the computer science and engineering tracks are okay. Even then, I'd be a little suspect, as I'd heard elsewhere that the number of graduates has increased by 110% but the market for jobs hasn't. The good old days of ZIRP and wildly too-small talent pool are likely over for good.
wafflemaker
Wouldn't it also mean, that while ⅕ of CS grads initially work as support (for example), the people with just the education needed for that (vocational school) didn't get that job, because it went to someone with a better degree?
So it's not that bad after all. At least you got the job, while somebody else didn't.
This is just me thinking. Never been to the US and I'm guessing that's what the discussion is about.
convolvatron
there was almost certainly a demand issue with graduates of technical schools. Also increased privatization leading to some really awful scammy institutions. I personally went to college and washed out, and would have been much better served by getting schooled in the trades, but I think this is really a pretty bad multi-dimensional corner we've backed ourselves into (primary, secondary, and post-graduate schooling, employment).
kakacik
Discussions and concerns we simply dont have in Europe. There are costs, but nothing significant from public schools themselves, rather just accommodation, food, travel etc. Some folks still go to private ones, but those are mostly not for extra prestige but rather different focus, or those who are not that great students themselves.
Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
It costs something, but doesnt have to be ridiculous. Apart from infrastructure and basic security & defense(since we have russia trying to conquer us all in Europe) the only really valuable investments.
lamasery
> Unpopular here, but I judge degree of development / maturity of societies on 2 major factors : 1) how it can take care of the vulnerable members in need - mostly heathcare, with som basic social support to help you bridge between jobs, plus obviously (mostly self-earned but managed by state) retirement; and 2) how well it invests into its future via education on all levels. Education aint luxury but empowering basic need. The question then is, how much does given country wants to empower potentially all its citizens.
The test of Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" is a pretty good way of cutting through the details and getting to what matters: if you had to be reborn as someone in any country (or, had to choose between two, if we wanted to e.g. rank them), and you couldn't control anything about the circumstances (race, social status, money, intelligence level, disabled or not, et c.) but were leaving it up to a die roll based on the demographics of the place—which would you choose? The ones you're more-inclined to choose are the better ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
And yeah, stuff like ensuring the worst-likely-case for a resident isn't that bad, and that you get a significant helping hand to improve your lot, helps a ton to make a country more appealing, in this sort of thought experiment. Far, far more than e.g. making sure the few very-best-off really run away with the prize (which improves the appeal of such a place basically not at all).
wonnage
Some colleges seem to be glorified sports teams that happen to have a school attached.
NoGravitas
A lot of others are real estate companies that happen to have a school attached.
colechristensen
University is too expensive, bloating administrative budgets and "prestige" architecture combined with professional sports teams have led everyone astray from the two goals: advancing the forefront of human knowledge and preparing young people with the education to be free in their world.
Instead we're going to very expensive camp where most of the people flaunt laws for fun (there's no reason alcohol should be illegal for undergrads) and then grind to pass tests while not actually learning all that much OR becoming all that prepared for the world after university.
Particularly with how poorly academics are paid, it would be pretty damn easy to build a better university.
It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
chromacity
> It's not at all surprising people are leaving, university degrees are becoming minimum quarter million dollar participation trophies.
The vast majority of college degrees are nowhere near that. Average in-state tuition in the US is something like $9,000.
Now, some people want a trophy from Stanford, but that's a separate topic.
ProllyInfamous
If you are choosing to still attend college, my advice would be to get an A.B.E.T-accredited degree, to fall back upon (I have a non-BE science degree from a prestigious US institution == essentially worthless).
Being an engineer vs. being an engineer tech is a substantially life-quality difference.
But only if you choose to attend (I would not re-attend).
layman51
Is this related to the exam that some college graduates could take to become professional engineers?
coredog64
Necessary but not sufficient: My aerospace engineering degree is from an ABET-certified school. However, I skipped the class (and test) that puts you onto the track of being able to call yourself a professional engineer.
I would also suggest looking at the ABET certification interval for different campuses. It was a point of pride on our campus that we had a longer interval compared to the more established campus. We got the longer interval because ABET trusted our program to not need constant supervision.
ProllyInfamous
Exactly. Most 4-year engineering programs are accredited (but definitely not all).
Rougly speaking, it cuts the professional experience requirement in half, and makes the entire process of becoming a P.E. (professional engineer) much simpler (not easier).
There are multiple field tests, including the Fundamentals & Engineering exam that allows you to 2x your eng.tech. experience.
semiquaver
It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction. College expenses have been subject to cost disease for years and a reckoning is long due. I’m not sure if demographic change will produce this reckoning but something has to.
colechristensen
You just have to fire 80% of the administration, kill all of the "programs" which are trying to do this or that, and focus on A) providing the basic resources for academics to study and B) providing the basic resources for teaching.
Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The president of a university should have the pay and prestige that goes along with administering the parking garage and cafeteria and have few responsibilities or accolades beyond that.
secabeen
If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.
Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...
franktankbank
Those are under the umbrella of research and teaching no?
mrguyorama
But then how will the NFL run it's free feeder and athlete development program?
How will Disney get to profit off of selling college athletes as an entertainment product?
If college is accessible to even the poorest Americans, how will we maintain the claim that they are bastions of liberal brainwashing against millions of conservative people getting reasonable educations in basic things like "Political Science" that don't actually force them to become communists at all?
Who will ensure that only those who "Deserve" it can afford to get a degree through byzantine FAFSA workflows and departments? Who will ensure that being middle class means you have to pay out of pocket instead of getting a couple thousand dollars?!
HDThoreaun
College football is very profitable. What will go away is all the other sports.
topspin
"It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction."
There is a substantial collection of things that share this need.
doctorpangloss
There are only two businesses ChatGPT has really disrupted: Chegg and customer service.
There's disruption but not the good kind. The reckoning is cheating not demographics.
colechristensen
My most effective professors gave us the answers to the work we were expected to do. It was a much more effective way to learn than doing work and getting feedback to whether or not it was correct weeks later. Organizing academic work in such a way that "cheating" is even a concept is silly. You're there to learn, if you want to pretend that you learned I guess good for you but we need to just get over the fact that people can make it look like they did something when they didn't.
ecshafer
Universities got broken trying to make it for everyone, and also jacked up the price. Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
potsandpans
What is a "boutique major"?
ecshafer
I met someone who received a degree in "Happiness" from a reputable university and took a hodge podge of courses. There are also many inter-disciplinary degrees that make sense at a graduate degree level but not an undergraduate level.
mschuster91
> Return to traditional degrees, get rid of the boutique majors and things that belong in job training centers.
But who is gonna pay for these? (half-/s)
Reality is, employers don't want to pay the bill for job training centers or for German-style apprenticeship education. Universities aka degree mills are what keeps most large employers afloat - depending on the system, it's either the talent themselves (US via student loans), the government itself (Germany) or a mixture of both paying the bills, while employers get fresh trained talent without paying a dime.
ks2048
> The number of teenagers graduating from American high schools peaked last year.
The article doesn't seem to mention foreigners - particularly Chinese. Are those numbers expected to grow or shrink?
rtkwe
Under the current admin's policies shrink. After that who knows.
HillRat
That's really the key problem facing US universities, from land-grant colleges to the Ivies: everyone depends at least in part on closing budgetary gaps with global students who pay full freight. Current Administration policies, both specifically targeted at foreign students and more generally at higher education and immigration, are poisoning the seed corn colleges and universities rely on. The only good news, relatively speaking, is that Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States, which means that America and our higher education system can recover from this, should we have the fortitude to do so in the future -- there just isn't much in the way of competition.
gottorf
> Europe is evidently constitutionally incapable of taking advantage of what is a genuinely one-in-an-imperial-lifetime chance to drain intellectual capital from the United States
Perhaps you're already implying this, but for Europe to drain intellectual capital from the US, it would have to offer a hell of a lot more than cheap college for foreign students.
dmitrygr
> with global students who pay full freight
Some do, some pay nothing: https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2023/05/31/minnesota...
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danny_codes
IMO we should pay adults to go back to school. Make all public universities free and pay a living stipend. Give additional stipends for dependents. Easy win for everyone.
triceratops
American universities need to become more like their European counterparts in order for this model to work.
aorona
but why
danny_codes
It’s good for society. You get a more educated population, you get to redistribute wealth (reduce GINI is always a win), you get increased per capita productivity as people expand their skills.
glial
Well, for one thing, critical thinking and communication skills seem to be in short supply.
gottorf
Have you observed a lot of critical thinking and good communication from recent college grads?
PearlRiver
Students in America don't have jobs. You can be motherfucking Einstein but you will still have to be a waiter in a cafe to contribute to society and pay for your student room.
When you are 20 you don't need sleep.
munificent
As long as people are allowed to vote in the US, we have an incentive to ensure they are all well educated.
Surely a large part of this problem that the article doesn't mention is that college is too fucking expensive. And an obvious solution to that is to tax rich people and use that to fund universities so that students don't have to go so far in debt in order to become productive members of society.
It's crazy how many problems today boil down to "a tiny fraction of elites are hoarding all the wealth" and yet we seem to assume the solution of "tax them and use that money to benefit others" is simply impossible.
thfuran
We can always add more funding, but at some point it must be admitted that our system does not efficiently turn funding into education.
AnimalMuppet
But if we care about people being educated enough to vote, a high school education is enough. Or at least, what high school was 50 years ago was enough.
If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.
Schiendelman
Ironically, improving access to education funding may be what made college more expensive.
akramachamarei
The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. The tough pill to swallow, if we are to follow in e.g. Sweden's footsteps, is that you need to tax the middle class a lot more if you want the government to provide more services.
By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio and switching to Whole Foods when we're not even on pace to pay off the house??
1: https://manhattan.institute/article/correcting-the-top-10-ta...
munificent
> The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso.
I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument.
My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
Some amount of inequality is healthy. The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
> By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE.
Good point! It would be really great if the government wasn't funneling billions into the coffers of defense companies by starting nonsense wars.
Cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations and going into greater debt for it is a two-handed gift to the rich: they pay less taxes and they make money directly from the government by being paid interest when they loan money to the government.
gottorf
> I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument
Do you only ingest ideas from places that you're already inclined to believe? How do you get challenges to your beliefs?
> is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive.
> Some amount of inequality is healthy.
What amount of inequality is just right, then? On one hand you suggest that we should redistribute to lower inequality, but on the other you seem to see some kind of beneficial role, or at least a neutral role, of inequality in a society.
> The top 10% owning 80% of all wealth in the US is not.
Countries as diverse as Sweden, the Philippines, and Nigeria all have worse inequality in wealth than the US[0]. On the other end, countries like Iceland, Myanmar, and Turkmenistan have similarly low wealth inequality. I might posit that wealth inequality doesn't even make the top 10 of what makes a health society that's nice to live in.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
akramachamarei
I shouldn't have to tell you that "but it's a conservative think tank" is merely ad hominem. If you think Jessica Riedl is misrepresenting the facts, I and many others would appreciate your elaborating. I'm afraid you haven't even read it.
Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.
I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.
downrightmike
Debt is 120% GDP
mcmcmc
Who's "we"? Parties in power have a huge incentive to keep voters uneducated and gullible.
blix
You don't want the people to be uneducated, because you have no control over their thought processes, which could be dangerous an unpredictable. And it leaves space for someone else to educate them in way that conflicts with your interests.
Ideally, you would want them to be intentionally educated to a specific type of manipulable gullibility, where they are receptive to your messages, but resistant to messages from other sources.
czl
> specific type of manipulable gullibility
A congregation trained to say “amen” on cue.
GS523523
I'm sure a lot of people assume it's immoral rather than impossible.
ThrowawayR2
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make them drink." Inexpensive tertiary education means that more people go through the motions of being educated, à la high school, for an additional four years because "that's what they're supposed to do" and then emerge none the better for it.
A system of heavily subsidized post-secondary vocational schools, like what Germany has, seems like a better path.
codersfocus
One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination and your comment is a prime example of that.
JumpCrisscross
> One man's eduction is another man's indoctrination
This is pretty silly. Any amount of new knowledge tends to make the brain more critical. The only real exception is rote memorization without application.
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Right in the headline is a word choice I've notice lately that irks me, "democratization".
"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. In voting, "more access" means "more governing power" (in principle), but in other things, it does not.
If you want to use "democratized" applied to higher-ed, it would mean more people are involved in the decision-making, leadership, or ownership.