<story><title>Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-pushes-colleges-to-the-breaking-point-forcing-hard-choices-about-education-11588256157</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wincy</author><text>If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator.&lt;p&gt;There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.</text></item><item><author>ThrowawayR2</author><text>Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC.  (See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pbs.org&amp;#x2F;newshour&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pbs.org&amp;#x2F;newshour&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;most-americans-dont-r...&lt;/a&gt;). It wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.</text></item><item><author>lumost</author><text>One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts.  Why weren&amp;#x27;t state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents?&lt;p&gt;Note that I&amp;#x27;m aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k&amp;#x2F;year instate, and 40k&amp;#x2F;year out of state.  Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.</text></item><item><author>irishcoffee</author><text>The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k&amp;#x2F;year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k&amp;#x2F;year to attend instead of 30k...</text></item><item><author>matchbok</author><text>Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It&amp;#x27;s so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for &amp;quot;residence life&amp;quot;, plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.</text></item><item><author>xhkkffbf</author><text>I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they&amp;#x27;ve been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it&amp;#x27;s our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself&amp;#x2F;herself?&lt;p&gt;The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren&amp;#x27;t so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let&amp;#x27;s give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we&amp;#x27;ll get back to something sustainable and affordable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>acbart</author><text>Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there&amp;#x27;s a &amp;quot;self-identified conservative&amp;quot; who&amp;#x27;s been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I&amp;#x27;d go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It&amp;#x27;s hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I&amp;#x27;ve seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.</text></comment>
<story><title>Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education</title><url>https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-pushes-colleges-to-the-breaking-point-forcing-hard-choices-about-education-11588256157</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wincy</author><text>If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator.&lt;p&gt;There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.</text></item><item><author>ThrowawayR2</author><text>Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC.  (See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pbs.org&amp;#x2F;newshour&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;most-americans-dont-realize-state-funding-for-higher-ed-fell-by-billions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pbs.org&amp;#x2F;newshour&amp;#x2F;education&amp;#x2F;most-americans-dont-r...&lt;/a&gt;). It wouldn&amp;#x27;t have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.</text></item><item><author>lumost</author><text>One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts.  Why weren&amp;#x27;t state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents?&lt;p&gt;Note that I&amp;#x27;m aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k&amp;#x2F;year instate, and 40k&amp;#x2F;year out of state.  Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.</text></item><item><author>irishcoffee</author><text>The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k&amp;#x2F;year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k&amp;#x2F;year to attend instead of 30k...</text></item><item><author>matchbok</author><text>Agreed, sadly the demand is still there. It&amp;#x27;s so easy to get huge loans and as a result, there is no downward pressure on price. My tiny college had 5 full-time staff for &amp;quot;residence life&amp;quot;, plus a dean of that department. Totally unnecessary.</text></item><item><author>xhkkffbf</author><text>I wish I could be more sympathetic to the college industrial complex, but they&amp;#x27;ve been treat us poorly for years. Yes, I know it&amp;#x27;s our fault for demanding gold plated educational experiences and then going into crazy debt to finance it. But who wants to blame himself&amp;#x2F;herself?&lt;p&gt;The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren&amp;#x27;t so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let&amp;#x27;s give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we&amp;#x27;ll get back to something sustainable and affordable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>N1H1L</author><text>&lt;i&gt;State schools in US are often the best STEM schools.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.</text></comment>