| ▲ | bloomingkales 2 days ago |
| Higher education doesn’t want to shed its clergy status. It’s like they can’t figure out if education is truly a pure pursuit or just this crazy godly thing that is priceless but somehow has this exorbitant real world price that the clergy seems to value … They sell indulgences at this point, and I don’t think it’s a false analogy. Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. How do you question the price of something that’s equated to a gift from god or certainly using the same language - more or less. |
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| ▲ | ak_111 2 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| "Selling indulgence" is a bit of gross generalisation though. Getting a medicine or technical degree from a top-tier university does prepare you technically for a very technically demanding job. Whatever replacement you imagine for this phase of such occupations will end up reinventing something very similar to university. Do you imagine people should jump straight into these occupations without undergoing some kind of training/testing that they reached a certain level of technical understanding of their occupation? The problem is that many universities have accreted huge management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not unique to universities. |
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| ▲ | bloomingkales 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I’m not really beating around the bush. A university cannot normalize the prices of all of their majors around outlier majors that have more market demand. They cannot also bundle a “premium” package of the college experience (which evidently now involves indentured servitude, which I’m guessing comes after premium room and board pricing?). Check the whole bill, everything is out of whack. Drop the prices of 90% of majors, that one should be obvious. Sharing the wealth should be obvious too, but that one isn’t either apparently. So they overcharge, and then don’t pay their own. It’s massive pricing issue mired in severe levels of piety and self importance. No one wants to replace universities, they want them to stop scamming. | | |
| ▲ | ak_111 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I am arguing this is mostly explained by universities being taken over mba-type managers: launching new products (i.e non-sensical degrees), turning university study into an "experience", ... is all the sort of thing that mba type do and not unique to university (see Boing, Intel, ...) But the core idea of university remains as sound and essential to a well-functioning society as it gets. From time immemorial you needed gatekeepers to recognised professions who: a) provide hands-on training to the next generation b) certify that a trainer has reached a sufficient level of mastery to practice the profession. Calling this process "selling indulgence" is my issue with your argument. |
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| ▲ | kergonath 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This comment and the whole tread are completely surreal. What clergy status, exactly? The second paragraph makes absolutely no sense, either. |
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| ▲ | MrMcCall 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well put, and that's a good part of the reason they're going the way of the Catholic Church. That said, I'd call it an 'aristocracy' instead. But, tomato/tomahto, ya know? |
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| ▲ | graemep 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Both British universities (I do not know about globally) and the Catholic Church have expanded rapidly in recent decades. | | |
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| ▲ | II2II 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Holier than thou institution where everyone must pay the price for their product or be doomed as a person. One cannot place all of the blame at the foot of the university. Employers also play a role, when they demand accreditation. Students are also to blame, when they fail to do research on what type of training they need to enter a field. As for the clergy comparison, let's just say that a multitude of people work within universities and those people have very different motivations from one another. Heck, they have very different motivations from one another even if they have the same job title. Painting them with one brush is excessive. |
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| ▲ | bloomingkales 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I never said “professors” or “deans”. I mentioned higher education specifically, as an industry. It’s the same as the wedding industry, they don’t give a fuck that they sell so much stuff around the romanticism of weddings regardless of its true value. Behold the romanticization of the diamond ring. You just, I don’t know, you convince people in their vulnerability, in love, hey, this is what love really is, an expensive ring, venue, etc Higher education at this point preys on the dreams of the parent/child via a financial vector. It’s highly pathetic that such a highly regarded element of society has the same business model as a movie theater, which is roughly “now that we found the people that want the real movie experience, we get to charge them $10 for popcorn and $7 for a soda”. Then the family walks out of the movie theater “hey we’re broke, but you really showed us the value of a real movie going experience, we’ll cherish forever”. I guess? What is this nonsense? Part of any good experience involves not getting ripped off, on any level. | | |
| ▲ | II2II 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I've been out of university for a couple of decades now, but I will admit that the "business model" was bothersome even in my time. That is especially true since it is more important to the success of a person than that diamond ring is to the success of a marriage or the viewing of a movie in theatres is to an individual's enjoyment of life. At least with your two examples of businesses preying upon the vulnerabilities of people, those vulnerabilities are entirely optional. People can, and do, choose other ways of expressing their commitment to their partners. People can, and do, find simpler (and non-commercial) ways to find pleasure in life. That said, I also think that people have to step back and look at what they hope to gain from their post-secondary education. Let's face it, universities are institutions that largely prepare people to work in institutions (may they be academic or business). For example: you don't need to go to university to become a scientist, but you do to work as a scientist in a university and many businesses. Granted, there are exceptions to that. Your chances of becoming a medical doctor are pretty much nil without attending university. |
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| ▲ | newsclues 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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| ▲ | dagw 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | 'Academics' probably have less trust and authority among the general public today than they've ever had. They're as a far away from the priest class of old as you could get. Truth was replaced with authority This is probably closer to the mark, but authority no longer rests with academics. | |
| ▲ | xhkkffbf 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | New? The churches created many of the oldest universities and many of them had a job of training future preachers. It's not a new idea. |
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