That's the root of the problem. Students are making demands, and I don't think they are being informed or rational about it.
No, they are not. However, when you combine that with slashed state budgets, it makes economic sense for a university to go ahead and organize/promote them. You are the one obsessed with universities cutting costs, this is a logical way to do it. If you don’t like it, write your state legislators and pressure them to stop cutting the state contribution to university budgets in every cycle.
You say they aren't for profit and just want to keep the lights on, but something here ain't right. Why has the price of tuition consistently risen up to twice as fast as general inflation rates?
Because the states keep cutting our fucking budgets. Have you not been reading? When the state of Arizona cuts the budget of its state universities by 40 fucking percent back in IIRC ’09 what the fuck do you expect them to do?
Hell, fuel prices have gone up faster than inflation, which means that the price of literally keeping the lights on goes up etc. Even with the massive balance sheet I gave you, you have no god damn idea. Costs go up, state budget contributions go down, large reseach grants now have a funding rate of less than 10% per submission. Do the god damn math.
Yeah, I know that's expensive. That's why I'm proposing to render as much of that shit unnecessary as possible!
And for some universities it will work. There are plenty of urban universities which have done that historically. Other universities have not, and don’t have the capacity to switch over.
There are of course the benefits I already listed to keeping grounds with gardens, demonstration space etc. These are things universities have historically had for a reason. The difference between the community formed inside a traditional university, and the communities formed by what I will call a compact commuter university is very stark. Having a university present can literally transform an entire city. Tempe would be an inner city shit hole without the ASU at its heart. The grounds around U of A literally keep inner city Tuscon surrounding it safe for kilometers. Austin would not have its unique liberal bohemian flavor without UT. There are a lot of college towns where the University is literally the only thing keeping said town from collapsing. Granted, this is my impression, though it is backed up by crime statistics, election results, comparison to nearby comparable and university free municipalities, as well as the fact that I have a good sample size (for personal experiences anyway) of universities and their surrounding environs. Universities provide public spaces for positive community-building organizations, natural history and art museums, public fora for professional meetings, generate demand for local business, supplement the policing of surrounding areas, produce professionals who often stay and gentrify a city, as well as all of the intangibles.
Does being "well-rounded" help you find a job? Or are you at the mercy of the university system for the rest of your life?
A) I have CHOSEN to remain as part of the academic community. I made that commitment when I was a small child and dedicated my life to the study of nature (most kids don’t know what they want to be when they grow up. I knew I wanted to be a biologist when I was three)
B) There is more to life than simply finding a job. The mandate of universities to produce knowledge, distribute that knowledge to the population, and produce well-educated informed people has been in place since the fucking 16th century. That education in a specific field gives people certain marketable skills is both necessary and incidental.
Do you really want to live in a world where people have only the knowledge of the arts, philosophy, history, languages etc that they learn in fucking high school? Where no one knew how to speak anything but English, Spanish and maybe French? Where everyone is a hyper-specialist in one field with no knowledge or appreciation for the others, and who is not properly informed on any question outside of the narrow perview? I know I don’t. I think you would feel the same way if you pulled the piggy bank out of your ass and realized that there are more important things than low-cost tuition.
It would be fucking fantastic if we lived in a country where the State paid for education. It would, in fact, be awesome, and the false choice you present (either keep paying shitloads in tuition, or cut back on the quality of universities) is just that. A false fucking choice. There is a third option, and if you think that it is inferior to the option you present here, then you need to fucking hang yourself by your own entrails from a ceiling fan and do the world a favor.
Anyway, I'm not saying being well-rounded is bad, but is it worth the money you pay for it compared to the alternatives? Are there other ways to achieve the same goal? If shit goes wrong, does it leave you with other options or just a lot of debt?
Not everything of value can be translated into dollars and cents, moron. Specializing in a field is a RISK, just like every choice you make. However, having some knowledge of other areas of knowlewdge is useful to the entirety of society. Chiefly, in the form of an informed electorate. I don’t think I need to be explicit on why that is a good thing.
Massive waste of money. We should just get medicare for everybody instead of inventing yet another duplication of effort in this field. Healthcare in America is such fucking bullshit.
Yes, I agree. We should have a single payer system, but we don’t. You don’t solve that problem by removing the safety nets that exist. What you are basically saying is that we should not waste money donating to medical charities because we should have a single payer system and thus they should not be necessary. Do I need to spell out why that is bullshit for you?
Even without medicare for all, there's still other choices for medicine. College students have the same options as everyone else. Of course, having the college enroll in a group plan, like the insurance you can get from an employer, might be worth it. But duplicating the providers too? Come on.
Wait wait wait. What? You are complaining about cost to students, and want to abolish taxpayer, tuition, and endowment subsidized healthcare? You do realize that when students have to pay for health insurance with their own money, they WILL have to spend more than if you subsidize it with endowments and state contributions right? This is basic addition and subtraction.
I rather wonder if this is why universities insist on being walled gardens too. You certainly wouldn't want those lower class proletarians mixing in with your snobby upper class networks!
Considering the number of socialists in academia (read: almost all) I think you are a bit off base here. Yes. Universities have pleasant walled gardens. However, they are generally NOT walled gardens. The walled gardens are there for a variety of reasons, attractiveness, providing nice serene study space etc. Universities do NOT keep out the poor, and a lot of funding goes specifically to provide need-based scholarships to the Proles.
Looking through it, the #1 expense is faculty salaries. #2 is research - a net loss in that budget, by the way. Servicing debt is also a big one, eating about 10% of their budget. Maybe if they were more modest early on, they could provide cheaper service today.
Heaven forbid we pay faculty decently. You know much an individual faculty member gets paid? Assistant Professor median is around 60k a year, Associate median is 70, Full Professor is around a hundred thousand per year. Considering the fact that they work 50-60 hour work weeks generally, and are in the top percentile in their fields, that is not exactly extravagant. There are just a lot of them in any given university, and because of budget cuts, fewer and fewer assistant professors are being hired/not getting tenure*, and the entire faculty is becoming old.
*Younger professors are not getting tenure because budget cuts have raised the bar on how much external grant funding they have to get in order to qualify (to the point that bringing in a couple million in grants is becoming insufficient in some second tier universities), and the funding rate for grants is less then 10%. This is what happens when you cut the state contribution to the budget. Faculty have been hit just as hard as the student body.
Time to slash pay then. They have nowhere to go, so they've go to deal with it.
It has already happened asshole (or rather, the ratio of full time to part time faculty has dropped, unpaid furloughs have been instituted, faculty has been down-sized etc)
Since faculty salaries are such a big expense, this will create a tangible savings that can be passed on to the students.
For the small price of long-term problems in the university system. How about you fuck yourself. Yes! Lets pay someone who works 60 hours a week and went to university for 8-12 years less than the manager at a fucking supermarket. No. That will not affect the long term ability of universities to recruit academics. Nope. It could not possibly lead to a long term brain-drain in the US, with increasing numbers of US academics becoming expatriates. Nope. Never.
Maybe you should have gotten an art degree so you could actually contribute to society outside of your comfort zone!
How about you go fuck yourself with razor-wire.
I DO contribute to society. A third of amphibians are going extinct, amphibians which are key components in almost every terrestrial and freshwater foodweb on the god damn planet. The animals that serve as ecological canaries across every temperate and tropical ecosystem, and who’s skin secretions have already yielded significant medical advances.
I contribute to society, it just does not translate directly into profit.
It's not like private investors never do high risk, long term projects. But if they can get the same results with someone else doing the work, of course they'll take it.
Let me get this straight: You want to remove much of biochemistry from the public sphere, and put it in the private sphere. Do you know what that will actually do?
1) Information becomes proprietary. When a corporation controls the IP rights for new techniques in biochemistry it restricts who can do what research and for how much, increasing costs through the whole system (including opportunity costs of talented people being unable to do certain types of work), and said knowledge becomes private rather than public property, which is inherently bad.
2) Corporations can and do suppress the dissemination of knowledge which runs counter to their monetary interests. They also have a proven track record of pushing scientists they contract with (not even in their actual employ, but who they simply contract with) to perform shoddy research that gives them the data they want, not what is real.
3) Goal directed enterprises are inferior to the current system. As is merit pay. Research in cognitive science and behavioral economics has shown repeatedly that people perform best in creative endeavors like science if they are free to do whatever the fuck they want. You pay them enough that they don’t have to worry about anything, and then you just let them free. Corporations don’t do this, so their output per unit dollar, even when you consider everything else, is much lower.
Is this a situation you want?
You're an elitist misanthrope. Lots of people can do science, even those without big names. You don't need the best of the best to get real work done. That's just for dick measuring.
What happens to the production of knowledge if you only hire first and second upper standard deviation within a given field? By definition it slows down. There is nothing wrong with, and I endorse the hiring of beat-cop scientists. They are the ones who form the bulk of the community, and do much of the highly detailed work, filling in the gaps in our existing knowledge base. However, think about what would happen system-wide if universities did not hire and attract the big names—keep in mind, these are the people operating not in the details of our knowledge base, but on its edge—the one’s who push the boundaries of our knowledge outward? The margins of human knowledge expand much slower.
And yes. I am an elitist misanthrope. I hate people, and wish I had a TARDIS so I could go back to 1 million BDH (Before Damn Humans) to relax and rebuild my morale. However, that has no bearing on this. Do you do research? No. Do you have even the slightest clue why people who have big names have them? No. I will tell you. It is because they intelligent (maybe not even the most intelligent) and work disgustingly hard in order to do what they do. They represent a part of humanity we should nurture and cherish, not grind into the dust with hand-wringing austerity promulgated by small people, with small minds.
I suppose we should go back to the days of noble patronage?
Your own graph said about two in five (industry obviously, and "all others" I imagine are folks with decent research budgets, but not the other categories leaves things like think tanks and the pure research parts of companies)!
Non-profits mostly, which yes, do specific types of research within their purviews, and often have research scientists with dual affiliations—one with them, one with a university—the problem is, there are not enough of them, and their areas are a bit restricted.
Industry does do SOME basic research. However, it is limited to only things with direct and immediate applications, mostly chemistry and materials science. They also often contract out the work. There are entire swaths of science like astrophysics, particle physics, ecology, certain areas of geology (you wont find corporate seismologists for example), physiology and most of psychology that are relatively depauperate in industry.
Your third graph also shows more than half the research is funded by the government. It just happens to be done universities (surely because it's a convenient location; they have the equipment. In a way, they are renting out their science facilities to the government! Good for them)... but again, the government is what's making it happen.
Jesus fucking Christ, go look up what the primary functions of the NSF and NIH are: funding research. Universities do not internally fund research very much (not directly anyway, more in that momentarily), the government does. Both of those agencies were formed post WW2 in order to fund science at universities, and they are the reason we were and continue to be the dominant force in the international endeavor that is science.
But, you are now arguing that the university has very little to do with it - it's mostly government funded.
Even private industry funds more basic research than universities and colleges, according to your own source.
See above. The government FUNDS it, it does not PERFORM it outside of a few large national laboratories doing very goal-oriented research. For example, the NIH has its own massive facility in Maryland, but the bulk of its budget goes to funding university sciences dealing with health and medicine. Once again, you prove you have no idea how funding research actually works.
a) You're factually wrong, according to your own source. Did you actually read it?
Yes. Yes I did. You just don’t know how to interpret it, and you don’t know how to actually read what I am writing.
Step 1: Professors Apply for Grants, usually from various sources in the federal government, but sometimes from private entities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Non-Profit organziations who give grants such as the World Wildlife Fund, the March of Dimes etc
Step 2: The University takes 40-50% off the top of those grants (when the granting agency is large enough to have these rates negotiated), and uses it to keep the lights on, pay technicians who maintain common equipment, maintain research facilities and pay their staff (like the people who run Animal Care Facilities, the guy who runs the 454 gene sequencer or micro-array, maintenance contracts on that equipment etc) and perform building maintenance. Federal money makes up the vast majority of these funds.
Step 3: Some funds may be set aside for small grants to graduate students, travel to and from professional meetings, that sort of thing
Step 4: Monetarily productive departments may subsidize the operations of less well funded departments. So, for example, money left over from funding the physics department may cover the relatively small research expenses of the sociology or anthropology departments who only really need travel funds and graduate students to operate.
Step 5: The entire amount is still part of the university budget, including what the professors spend on equipment, materials, funding graduate students etc.
Step 6: Some small amount, though not research itself, may be covered in the general fund. For example, the electricity running the greenhouse may be taken from the general fund, or the cost of maintaining a research station in Antarctica may be funded by a specific endowment. However, tuition does not generally cover these costs, save for a tiny percentage which cannot otherwise be partitioned from the rest of the budget (a building’s air conditioning for example).
Step 7: Anything over any and all of the above amounts goes into the university general fund. This of course varies from year to year, and some years may exist where the grant money does not sufficiently flow, and research productivity drops.
c) The Federal government pays for most of it, and would surely continue to do so if universities weren't able to do it anymore. They'd probably just switch to private contractors (whether for profit or not for profit) or people who work for a government agency directly (like NASA).
Which is the point. The university does NOT by and large pay for it, so cutting that part of the university mission saves absolutely nothing, and costs you research productivity in the short term, and the existence of academia in the medium to long term. Where do you think graduate students, post-docs, and new professors COME from anyway? Oh. That is right. Universities. Where do you think the expertise of a professor in their field comes from? Oh, that is right. Doing research.
Fuck you.
Also, I'll note that I'm not actually against research. If they cut back so it actually broke even with Federal money, fine, it's not a cost anymore. Having that equipment bought and paid for by the government probably does help the students, so good for them.
This is exactly what happens. Total research=total grant funds, or almost equals when you consider multiple use budget items (like air conditioning).
And it works, until you run out of suckers. Then you get a collapse and a lot of colleges are going to go tits up as tuitions are forced to come back down.
And I will note here that Universities are in a massive bind. They simply have no choice. Funding cuts at the state level, funding rate of less than 10% on most federal grant submissions, flagging stock market (so endowments take a hit), we would expect that the only other source of funding for university operations—tuition—will climb, and it will climb faster than inflation.
You will note that this started to happen when Saint Reagan took the oval office and instituted massive tax cuts. I wonder what the data would look like if I annotated it with major political shifts, and thus shifts in the policies of states. Maybe broke the data down by state?
With tuition being subsidized yet still rising, I'd like to know where the hell all that money is going. They don't have shareholders, so that can't be it.
Student numbers are increasing, which increases the costs of operation for a university. At the same time, governments have been in recent years cutting the percent of GDP going to the NSF and other granting agencies, which decreases what universities can get in grant funding, at the same time states have cut university budgets. You make the mistake of assuming that there are only two terms in the equation. There are more than that.
Actually, it can be and is overemphasized. Alyrium's graph showed that, in the United States, universities contribute comparatively very little to the creation of knowledge aside from some floor space. By far, the majority of the money is tax dollars or from private enterprises (both for-profit and not-for-profit). Money is what talks, not location.
No. Money, People, Permanent Equipment, Academic Freedom and yes, Floor Space are what count. Not just money.
You cannot just pick up and move a research program somewhere else. You need a computer to do programming. A geneticist needs space, hideously expensive equipment, trained staff, and most importantly, the freedom to do what research he or she wants. Granting agencies provide the money, which pays for permanent equipment and staff. The university provides the space, and the academic freedom.
A corporate lab, or national lab, does not have the academic freedom a university does. As a result, both the depth and breadth of knowledge that can be obtained using either medium is limited.
If they are working with universities it's probably just because that's currently the easiest place to find people and equipment right now. If universities disappeared, the proportions would simply change, just like how I'd simply move if I were to be evicted from my house.
Where would they go? Lets do a thought experiment and assume that all universities in the US closed their doors to research.
Chemistry: Many will be able to find work in corporate America, if their area of expertise is in petrochemicals, natural products etc. However, a great many chemists work in areas that further knowledge of chemistry in general, but which cannot be applied in say, product development directly. What incentive does a company have to hire them and continue this research? What non-profit entity has this in their purview?
Biology: There are almost no biologists not working on medical research or crop genetics who would ever find work. Some plant and soil ecologists might be able to find work in private companies dealing with Restoration of wetlands as required by the Clean Water Act. However, that is a very small number. A few conservationists would find work with non-profits. Other than that, no biology will ever be done again. Why? Because corporations have no incentive to hire them, and in fact have a disincentive, because the information they generate runs COUNTER to their interests. Or do you think that the ecotoxicologist could get hired by Sygentia to tell them that their products turn frogs into transsexuals, when they can simply control the EPA panel and make it no longer matter?
In none of these cases will these researchers ever have the capacity for free inquiry. They will do the research that the CEO tells them to do, and their ability to publish will be dictated based upon whether their results contradict the results the CEO wants. Research Fraud will be rampant, just as it is in for-profit medical research NOW. Any knowledge that is generated will also become proprietary trade secrets of the company controlling the IP rights.
Is this a world you want to live in?
All of this of course ignores the problem of where these academics will come from in the future.
Go castrate yourself with electrified barbed wire.
Your misguided theory that knowledge creation would continue on unimpeded if universities didn't employ researchers is wrong. A university (and to a lesser extent, national laboratory) is the only type of entity that can reasonably employ, full-time, researchers that are doing work for which there is no short-term or medium-term industrial application or prospect of profit. Universities are the only institutions that employ people to do research knowing that the research may very well lead to a dead end or that will have no redeeming monetary reward. Universities conduct fundamental research because at universities, it is believed that research and the expansion of knowledge are valuable for their own sake. It is for that reason that universities are able to cultivate such a large community of researchers and intellectuals, which is unmatched by any other type of organization.
Magis hits the nail on the head.
I do my work better than any other competing consultant, but if I, and all other overpaid consultants in the world, were to give it up all at once,the work would still be done because the money is still there.
Either some new entrepreneur would take up consulting, or the clients would expand their in-house developers.
This is true because there is profit in consulting. There is NOT profit in studying sexual selection, or astrophysics, transposons, plant development, the metabolism of archeobacteria etc.
You just keep asserting it over and over again, but that doesn't mean it makes sense. The people would still be there (perhaps looking for work!). The money is still there (perhaps looking for people). It's a match.
See above.
False. Alyrium's graph showed about 20% of "basic research" is done by private industry in the United States right now. Historically, the number was even higher.
And research productivity was also lower.
ALL product development or any kind may very well lead to a dead end. The reason it's done is a) sometimes it isn't a dead end and b) even if something doesn't work out, the side benefits may be worth it. Side benefits include things from minor developments toward the main goal to simple perks to attract employees.
And science != product development.
They do it for the money.
Have you ever talked to an academic scientist? We don’t do it for the money. If that was our primary motivation, we would have all gone into medicine or petroleum geology. We do it because we LOVE what we do. Virtually all of the lower and middle administration of a university is comprised of academics serving temporary terms (the department head for example is just another faculty member who splits his time between administration, research, and teaching, as are most deans). Until recently this was also the case with university presidents and provosts (and governor appointed boards of regents), however, this has shifted in recent years toward MBAs (university presidents) who are professional administrators and who have applied their particular money-grubbing professional bias toward the running of universities. This however, has not and will not trickle down to the faculty culture. Just the opposite in fact. It is the faculty senate and the state faculty relations committees which fight the very measures these pieces of shit try to put in place.
The university is an institution and is defined by the people who compose it.
