<story><title>Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/colleges-covid-applicants.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ClumsyPilot</author><text>&amp;quot;from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich&amp;#x2F;talented&amp;#x2F;dilligent&amp;#x2F;take your pick).&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. 
Oxford&amp;#x2F;Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.&lt;p&gt;Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?&lt;p&gt;A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.</text></item><item><author>awillen</author><text>I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it&amp;#x27;ll be both.&lt;p&gt;The reality is it&amp;#x27;s really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they&amp;#x27;ll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>keiferski</author><text>The funny thing is how people constantly bemoan the state of politics, yet consistently argue for evaluating degrees entirely based on their financial outcome. As if an educated citizenry will just appear from the ether.&lt;p&gt;The connection between the two seems pretty obvious to me.</text></comment>
<story><title>Interest surges in top colleges, while struggling ones scrape for applicants</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/us/colleges-covid-applicants.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ClumsyPilot</author><text>&amp;quot;from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment &amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I always found this idea amazing, we just accept that univerities are not really there for education but instead a giant sorting machine to separate plebs from (rich&amp;#x2F;talented&amp;#x2F;dilligent&amp;#x2F;take your pick).&lt;p&gt;They don&amp;#x27;t work like a normal market, there best company grows their production, and supplies millions with the best goods. 
Oxford&amp;#x2F;Harvard take their miniscule intake of a fraction of a percent every year, and opening door to unwashed masses would destroy their brand.&lt;p&gt;Do the best universities have best teaching technique, or are they best because they pick brightest students and they contribute nothing special?&lt;p&gt;A healthy market of affordable education cannot be build on this foundation of 16th century elitism, exclusion and zero-sum principle.</text></item><item><author>awillen</author><text>I think this is generally a good thing. I believe there are really two positive things that can come out of going to college - either you get a name-brand degree that opens doors and gets your resume looked at, or you get useful skills that enable you to go down a particular career path (e.g. CS degree). Obviously in some cases it&amp;#x27;ll be both.&lt;p&gt;The reality is it&amp;#x27;s really tough to make any case that a humanities degree from a lower or even mid-tier college is a worthwhile investment of money and time. Now obviously there are scholarships and students who come from wealth for whom this is less of an issue, but to pay tens of thousands of dollars a year for a degree in classics from third tier U is just an objectively bad choice for most people.&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this is the market working - people are learning how to value educational degrees based on what they&amp;#x27;ll actually yield financially and making decisions accordingly. Those schools that are providing substantial negative value to their students ought to go under, and the students who would attend them and end up in huge debt with minimal job prospects will make a better investment, like working for four years, going to a trade school, etc.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jankyxenon</author><text>In many other countries, top academics and researchers are at large public universities.&lt;p&gt;Maybe it would be money well-spent for the public-sector to poach top academics from private intuitions.&lt;p&gt;It would lead to salary inflation, but might be the most cost effective way to sap prestige and inject into good public universities.</text></comment>