It costs a lot to run schools these days, far more than it seems like it should cost. A lot of that is lots of administrators, it still seems like there is a gap to explain though?
I present Accounting For College Costs. Its data is a decade old at this point, but the conclusion at the time was:
based on the accounting data [long term growth in] college costs are driven mainly by a large increase in diversity of courses available, which results in much lower student/faculty ratios, and correspondingly higher costs per student.
I am not so concerned about people getting extra time, as for most tests the deadline should be a mercy to prevent students from staying there for days, rather than costing you a lot of points.
I can't recall ever taking a test in school or university where time wasn't a pretty scarce resource, unless it was easy enough that I could just get everything right before the deadline without needing to rush.
I’m sure people would get mad if schools offered classes in “how to game tests”
Would they? in freshman year of high school in 2001 in NY everyone had to take a semester of "Regents Prep" which was basically exactly that, a class in how to take the state standardized tests better.
The Biden Administration disagrees, as part of its ongoing determination to screw up basic economic efficiency and functionality.
Did this happen during the previous administration, or is it Trump administration?
I agree that this policy is relevant, but I think putting "disagrees" in the present tense is a typo
"""
The Obama Administration had a great idea, which was to encourage Inclusive Access, a program where tuition includes the cost of their textbooks. This simplifies, creates price transparency, allows for aid to be calculated property, avoids students choosing classes or skimping on books to save money, and aligns incentives generally.
It seems obviously correct.
The Biden Administration disagrees, as part of its ongoing determination to screw up basic economic efficiency and functionality. They want to ban such programs. Some people frame the question of which way works better as complex. I do not think this is complex. At least this time they are not trying to steal a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to give mostly to wealthy party supporters, as they did in student loan forgiveness.
"""
There’s a time and a place for everything. It used to be called college.
Table of Contents
The Big Test
I am continuing to come around to the high-stakes-in-person-exam (or series of such exams) as the only practical solution to AI, also it was probably mostly the right answer already.
My guess we should give students the opportunity to create a floor in other ways. Essentially I think of this as a deal – if you do the assignments and participation and so on in a way that demonstrates effort, and something goes wrong, we will soften the blow for you, which also encourages students in danger not to skip them. But if you’re confident, then that’s all indicative, and only the test matters.
Testing, Testing
An alternative theory of how LLMs take tests, also great practical advice.
My counterargument would be that physics is the best case scenario. You do indeed know a lot about physics, because the world is made of physics. The tricks work great.
Most other subjects are not like that. You cannot get as far.
ACT makes science portion optional. Also scores keep going down.
Legalized Cheating On the Big Test
This is the world we have created, in so many ways, and you wonder why students are so eager to use ChatGPT.
I am less scared by the ease of cheating and more by the view of not cheating as meaning you don’t love your kids. I am not so concerned about people getting extra time, as for most tests the deadline should be a mercy to prevent students from staying there for days, rather than costing you a lot of points.
The historical rate of cheating was not low, although far from universal.
Whereas, this is the grading system Working as Designed, or at least how it should have been designed:
Then there’s the outright mandatory gaming of the system:
Well, actually, we totally do lots of forms of this now, except that too much of it is specialized rather than general. So we can’t even do this right.
What Happens When You Don’t Test For Academics
Stanford introduced a remedial math course in 2022. Given the applicant pool there should be no such class. Why are we admitting enough students who need this class to have an entire class? If you’re worth the exception you’re worth hiring tutors or finding some other way.
A look back at an early 20th century middle school exam. If the kids can pass this, then on those subjects I’d be satisfied the kids are all right.
What Happens Without Academic Standards
In The New York Times, Jonathan Malesic claims There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore, and the reason seems to be they’re no longer required to do it, with the author cutting down from nine required books to none, but vowing to return to one next term?
Or rather, the argument is that what you learn in school does not matter?
In which case, um, why have a college at all, if you’re not going to force students to do the things they wouldn’t be doing anyway that you think is good for them? Did you think students used to read books because the big paying jobs wouldn’t hire you unless you had mastered The Iliad?
And why would you think that finance, consulting and tech are luck? They are very much not luck at all. Your success in school matters on the job market quite a bit, as do your knowledge and skill. It’s just not the knowledge and skills that Malesic teaches, which is fine, but it also never was.
Another Academic Standard Perhaps
A paper examines the impact of remote learning on the beauty premium for university students.
I find the ‘interact more’ hypothesis amusing, since it’s a strange way of saying ‘professor can (at least within reason) make up whatever grades they want.’
A plausible hypothesis for the productive trait in males is confidence, and a willingness to interact and work the system, that survives not being physically proximate in a way that similar female strategies do not. Preference for interaction in males could be much more strongly tied to attractiveness than in females, for several obvious reasons.
RIP Columbia Core Curriculum and Also Social Theory
When I was forced to endure the Columbia Core Curriculum, I would not say I enjoyed my experience, but I understood why most of the books were there. Claude offers this summary, which mostly matches my experience but not entirely, and the ones that were added as optional (like Rawls and Marquez) seemed quite bad:
Whereas now, well, this does not seem like it is Doing The Thing at all. It seems like it is doing a very different, deeply ideological thing, in at least the relevant section: Indoctrinating students into degrowth?
Also, yeah, if the most important texts on ‘social theory’ are all about degrowth, or even if that is a plausible claim to make, then we need to ‘degrow’ ‘social theory’, with starting over afterwards being optional.
Someone else tried to defend the curriculum by scrolling up a bit:
So there’s still some of the real thing there, such as Smith and Kant, and I’m going to guess if you look at the Fall term, once we go back before there is an America to despise, that part survived more intact. This is still overall a very different mandatory product, clearly with a very different mandatory goal.
College Tuition and Costs
Tuition is going… down?
We will see if this is sustained, but tuition is at least not going substantially up in inflation-adjusted terms. Debt is going down.
Public first-time, full-time, in-state tuition in four year colleges is both highly affordable and declining rapidly in real terms, in terms of what the students actually pay?
That’s not the story you typically hear. Borrowing is down too:
Graduate school is a different story here. Increasingly the forward-looking student debt problem looks like a graduate school and private (often for profit) college problem. Paying $10k total for four years of college is a fantastic deal, and not an amount that should be hard to repay. The actual catch is that you have to spend those four years learning rather than working.
It costs a lot to run schools these days, far more than it seems like it should cost. A lot of that is lots of administrators, it still seems like there is a gap to explain though?
The Obama Administration had a great idea, which was to encourage Inclusive Access, a program where tuition includes the cost of their textbooks. This simplifies, creates price transparency, allows for aid to be calculated property, avoids students choosing classes or skimping on books to save money, and aligns incentives generally.
It seems obviously correct.
The Biden Administration disagrees, as part of its ongoing determination to screw up basic economic efficiency and functionality. They want to ban such programs. Some people frame the question of which way works better as complex. I do not think this is complex. At least this time they are not trying to steal a trillion dollars of taxpayer money to give mostly to wealthy party supporters, as they did in student loan forgiveness.
Here’s exactly what UPenn actually costs, huge props for laying this out there.
It seems kind of insane that it’s $30k a year in charges even if you don’t pay ‘tuition’? I mean wow, seriously. It seems like about $7800 of that is actually just de facto tuition that they call ‘fees,’ and the meal plan costs $6534 and is mandatory for two years, which students called a ‘blatant cash grab,’ as is the housing.
Looking at this as a marginal tax rate, we see a huge cliff at $75k, with an instant overall 39% tax rate attaching if you cross that boundary, and overall on the first $400k the tax rate is 23%. That’s all on pretax income, not post.
Negotiation
Did you know that once accepted at a college, you can absolutely negotiate?
For the students a college actually wants, such as those getting merit scholarships, once they’ve already committed the slot they realize a large surplus when you say yes. So it makes sense to try and negotiate a bit. They’re not going to rescind the offer.
Skipping College
On a purely self-interested basis who should skip college? Bryan Caplan notes that the jobs not requiring degrees are often quite solid, you shouldn’t let people potentially looking down on you distract you from that fact. Nor should you let others tell you whether you are ‘smart,’ you know better than they do.
He then focuses on the sheepskin effect, that most of the selfish benefits of college come when you graduate, and that if you pick an easy major you probably won’t see much benefit even then. So he sensibly suggests that you should go to college only if you have what it takes to reliably graduate with a ‘real’ major, which he equates to roughly an SAT of 1200, adjust your score 50-100 points for grades and motivation. And if you think you’re going to get through via an extraordinary effort, why not put that effort elsewhere?
I would take this one step further. In the Caplan model, the alternative to college is getting a standard job and career track, like trying to be a manager at Panda Express. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But you can almost certainly do better if you go to trade school and move towards a job like plumber or electrician. The middle path is basically free money.
And then there’s the other path, which is entrepreneur, of starting a business, which can be a startup but in no way needs to be one. This is The Way, if you can do it.
Or you can do any number of other things, such as learn to code, play poker, et cetra.
Skipping college to go straight into a job you would have wanted anyway, or at least spending less time in school first, is the definition of nice work if you can get it, if that work is indeed sufficiently nice.
The trick is convincing them to let you do that, and it makes sense that some employers like Palantir are trying to hire right out of high school instead.
Ruxandra Teslo argues this is all also feminist, because it allows women to get into position to start families while still within their fertility window, but as she says this benefits everyone. Who wouldn’t want to start real work at 18 instead of 24?
Flo Crivello outright makes the case that essentially no one should ever go to college and people should start working at age 14-16 as he did, that working is a better education than a formal education, and noting that Ben Franklin started working full-time at 12, Carnegie at 13 and Rockefeller at 16. Whereas the modern plan is that college and even your 20s are for ‘fucking around’ and this does not go great especially for fertility but also for producing value. The problem is getting out of the signaling trap.
Respect Their Authoritah
Another reason to skip college: What are they largely trying to teach you?
A huge fraction of the smartest people I know spend their lives trying to recover from this, generally with mixed success. You can mitigate, but you can’t entirely cure.
Men Skipping College
Why are so few men going to college? There are essentially three theories.
These theories are not exclusive.
Celeste Davis offers a potential new version of a mix of theory two and theory three: Male flight.
The rational decision version of this is a prestige and robustness story. Here are two stories given of male flight.
If a profession becomes lower paying and lower prestige, there is a lot less reason to go into that profession. A large influx of new students is a lot of extra supply, so it is inevitable that at least pay will go down. And if prestige is also doomed to go down, or the profession will now damage your outlook in the dating market, then however unfair that is, that’s another good reason to bolt.
On the other hand, the local story is very much in category three. You, a straight unmarried man, didn’t study that because you would have been taking the class with a bunch of college women? Yeah, seriously, what an idiot. It’s one thing for men not to want to be in places that men inherently don’t want to be, that makes sense, A is A. But to run from a place you’d otherwise want to be, because too many women? You can say ‘they are worried people won’t think you’re manly’ or cite whatever ‘masculinity norms’ you want, it’s all shorthand for What an Idiot.
The same goes for college in general. If you are a man and hear that a college is 60/40 female, and you think ‘oh that means I would have a worse time there,’ then, again: What an Idiot. And then it happens again on the dating market.
If the men don’t see the value in that, they probably shouldn’t go to college after all. They clearly are not smart enough.
Stanford Still Hates Fun
Julia Steinberg did an excellent job interviewing new Stanford President Levin, discovering yet more reasons to skip college.
I’m hopeful to see a game theorist running the place. But his answer about how he is using game theory is a bunch of generic contentless slop, as Tyler Cowen correctly noticed was Levin’s general practice throughout.
Another question was about the COLLEGE curriculum, where students are ‘contract graded’ gets an automatic A if they turn their work in on time ‘regardless of quality,’ seriously what the hell is that? If you want to be pass/fail, I hate that but at least actually be pass/fail, everyone getting an A makes a mockery of the concept of grades. The very name ‘contract graded’ is a dystopian nightmare. Levin tries to say this is ‘the best tradition of something at Stanford’ to try new things out, and iterate and improve, but that’s not an excuse, nor does he show any sign he understands the problem.
He is challenged that professors on “Democracy day” turned it into a mandatory Harris campaign event, and he says that was ‘choices’ of professors so it’s fine. He’s challenged that donations are 96% democratic and he blames the zip code. He says the giant ‘No Justice No Peace Banner’ can indefinitely hang because it’s advertising an exhibit. He later says they need to be ‘open to’ debate from ‘all ideologies’ but I see no sign he has any indication of making that happen?
On AI, he tries to pretend that Stanford is still relevant, rather than it having almost no chips and its top professors abandoning academia for business. And he tries to have it both ways, with AI changing education while Stanford somehow continues to make sense and keep its people employed.
His refusal to even say the best or worst dorm is the central answer here. No fun!
Or perhaps it is this, classic, chef’s kiss:
He also wouldn’t name a favorite class or give any concrete prediction. What a tool.
Value of College
Another reason to maybe skip college:The wage premium for going to college for lower-income students has halved since 1960. Higher-income students take more profitable majors at better colleges now, so they benefit a lot more.
Tyler Cowen speculates this could be because the population is ‘more sorted,’ which implies a lot of the old premium was getting more out of the signaling mechanism combined with a sorting effect, and also that the students who did go to college were in better position to benefit. The paper suggests it is because we’ve neglected the lower level universities.
Employment Prospects After College
No, philosophy and art history are not good ideas for staying employed. Sorry.
Consider those last two lines. Yes, philosophy has a lot less unemployment, but I’d much rather be in the physics group. The median wage is almost 50% higher and the right tail is big if you pivot into tech or finance. I do think the higher unemployment is that art history or philosophy majors know they can’t hold out for the jobs they most want, whereas the physics and computer science majors can hold out.
Fixing College
Tyler Cowen says we need a revolution in higher education, and we will know it when we see top universities stop thinking about teaching in terms of satisfying a fixed ‘class load’ and start rewarding innovation and adapting to what makes sense for teaching a given subject.
The post is confusing to me because it has the implicit background assumption that college is about learning things in classes, or that teaching things in classes is a large part of the job of a professor. I strongly agree the system could do a much better job of teaching material to students, but my presumption is that it is not so interested in doing that, either in relation to AI or otherwise.
Hollis Robbins argues that business metrics broke the university. Colleges increasingly started maximizing for student outcomes, prestige and other KPIs, and used centralized power to do it. In the process they deprioritizing getting out of the way for faculty so that departments and professors could run their own corners and power bases both to do unique work and advocate distinct positions. Which also meant that there was nothing to stop various ideological pressures coming from certain parts of the faculty and student body from overrunning the campus.
Do Not Donate To A College
If you’re trying to Do Good, donating to your Alma Mater is deeply foolish.
So, if you are a college, what do you do when people stop feeling obligated to do it?
They’re not wrong. I’m happy kids have realized this is stupid, and they’ve already been robbed enough. The only reason to donate is to get your kids into that college. But that’s a rather dim motivation at this point. You don’t get that huge an edge unless you’re paying through the nose, you don’t know that edge gets sustained, you don’t know your kids will want to go there or even go to college at all.
So, what’s next? I don’t think Eliezer’s suggestion here works at all, but it’s fun to think about it.
The degree is some combination of education, socialization and signaling. The first two can’t be taken away from you via degree revocation. So what this takes away is the signal, but mostly that signal should still stand despite the revocation, especially if there’s a pattern of revoking it for dumb stuff. Almost no one will even check. And obviously, if the college can ‘hold you up’ for more money later, there’s a lot less motivation to go to college at all.
As a concrete example, if I was told I’d lose my degree if I didn’t donate, I wouldn’t give them even one cent for tribute. I’d let them revoke my degree, what the hell do I care, also f*** you.
Not Doing The Math
A lot of the math has been cancelled, because the math is being done at universities.
The people defending this decision are saying, essentially, that UCLA was acting sufficiently badly that it was necessary to not give them a dollar, and if he ‘stood idly by’ while UCLA did that, it’s on him, too.
There’s a thin line between ‘I don’t want you or your work to suffer’ and ‘you have no right to complain when it bites you in the ass [and you or your work suffers.]’
Very ‘look what you made me do’ energy, except also with very big ‘everyone be quiet or I’ll shoot this puppy’ and then without waiting you go ahead and shoot the puppy and also another puppy energy.
If you go down this road, you have shown me what your priorities are. I really really don’t want to hear about how the future is determined by whether we ‘win the AI race’ and ‘beat China.’ It seems you think the future depends more on something else.
I do think this is a good question, to the extent we are worried not about math in general but about Tao in particular, which is not what Tao is worried about:
Yes, one of the advantages of refusing to fund things is that in the most egregious cases, at least up to some scale of cost, someone will step up to take your place.