Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.
This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.
Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.
The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.
Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.
Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.
Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.
I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.
This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
> terrible article
> Awfully muddled thinking
> right-wing propaganda
> laughably poor argument
> propagandist rant
> First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class".
> Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money?
> And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US.
> Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
> Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.
> would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades
You haven't really addressed my first point. What's the evidence that libraries serve the poor more than universities? I was trying to point out that we can make all the assertions we want, but none of them might be true, so we need to guided by data not opinions or anecdotes. You seem to have missed this point.
Administration costs, questionable research, credentialing, etc. That huge increase in tuition costs is going somewhere, isn't it?
My understanding is that tuition is rising because of university funding being cut. In fact, some of the first few articles when you google for this are [1, 2, 3] which clearly couple tuition increases with budget cuts. Are you not aware of this?
Are you seriously claiming that university tuition is being increased simply to fund "questionable research" etc.?
This is the unnecessary barrier. Now you have to spend money and time to get a degree just to keep up. If you can't do that, you're worse off.
This is a product of the economic system we live and I fail to see how reducing university funding will solve this problem.
Yes, many great innovators do not have college degrees. They help prove my point.
No, I don't think it proves your point. You said people can't do anything of value without a college degree and the existence of people who have done things of value without a degree disproves your point.
Of course it does. yummyfajitas has covered this already.
yummyfajita's claim, if valid, is a much weaker one than yours.
You're suggesting the only possible way to do this kind of research is through the university system as currently structured. This is an outlandish, unsupported claim, and you denigrate the people who performed this research by claiming they could only have done it within the modern university system.
That's not what I'm claiming. What I said was that given that this happened, that research has already more than paid for itself.
If you want to claim all of this research could have been done in some different setting (which you haven't specified), that might or might not be true depending on what you're proposing.
I'm skeptical though that a system that eschews public funding of research will work better than the current one. I think it's not a coincidence that the US is the pre-eminent leader in high-technology research and also houses some of the best graduate schools in the world.
[1] http://www.highereducation.org/reports/affordability_supplem... [2] http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/feb/01/florida-college-u... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/nyregion/cuny-board-approv...
Professional guilds - legal bars, medical boards, engineering, academia - you're pretty much excluded from all those fields lacking a formal degree accepted by the mentioned institutions, even tough you can have the required skills and even experience (as a skilled immigrant for eg., you can even have a degree from a non-accredited/foreign education institution). The monopolistic nature of this system is nicely illustrated by the "diploma mills" that allow people to get hired for the job requiring a diploma without completing the education program, perform their jobs successfully for considerable amount of time and then when/if discovered "cheating" get fired - without actually failing to do their job at any point, just because they don't have the degree. Granted this is logical from the employers point of view as the legal liability is huge but that's the result of the system.
>I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.
I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion and implied that without public funding the academic work wouldn't be done. Here's a different view of that argument : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4 , also he has a book on topic.
I think you're being generous to the author here. He said "people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value" which is different from your claim that you can't do some things of value that without a degree.
In any case, none of this is an indictment of the university itself. While I agree that it's possible that some of these professions might be better served with looser guidelines, I don't see how the author's idea of cutting university funding will improve this situation.
I'd argue that you don't consider the opportunity cost and the crowding out of R&D investment in that assertion.
I'm not sure what you mean by "crowding out of R&D investment". If you're suggesting that the federal grant money would've been better spent on private entities doing research, isn't that what NSF and co. are already doing when they fund, say, professors at the likes of Princeton and Harvard?
I'm not disagreeing with this statement of yours, but I hope you realize that you're arguing a much weaker and better articulated position than the OP. If the OP is suggesting that we re-examine how federal grant money is allocated, I would consider that a defensible position. But he's clearly not saying that and has chosen instead to launch a broadside against the university institution and seems to have no evidence backing up his assertions.
Yes it does. Please learn about signalling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
If you want to argue that college is about human capital creation rather than signalling, be my guest. But insofar as college is signalling, it directly redistributes wealth from those without the signal to those with it.
I agree there may be an argument to be made that in cases, under certain circumstances, provided you can measure certain variables, the best action that results the "most public good" would be reducing university funding. If that's what you want to argue, then you'll need to do the legwork of gathering data that supports this conclusion.
The OP has not done that and is not even attempting to do so. He's made some overly simplistic arguments against university funding that are utterly lacking in depth.
EDIT: Can the downvoters please explain themselves?
>I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.
You don't like this part of the argument, so instead of refuting it you declare it "propaganda" and move on?
Look at the campaign contribution numbers of university professors and tell me that they aren't incredibly one sided.
I don't think you'll find anyone who will seriously argue with the premise that there are far more left leaning than right leaning professors.
Anecdote: When I was in college, I was much more conservative than I am now. I experienced outright disdain for my relatively moderate political beliefs from the majority of my professors and my peers; so much so that after a year or two I got tired of it and just learned to shut up.
First, this is the same argument that many creationists, followers of intelligent design and other religious nuts use to discredit evolution. In fact, if you look up the wikipedia page for Expelled: No intelligence allowed, you'll see that the idiots who made that movie used very similar language to the OP and in fact, my instinctive response when I read this bit, thanks to having heard this so many times from creationists was to immediately assume assume the OP was one. I didn't want this to color the rest of my response so I decided to ignore this bit.
Also, it's seems like flamebait to me. I suspect the OP threw it in there to antagonize those who disagreed with that idea while simultaneously enlisting the support of everyone who was once slighted for his/her political views by a professor.
Finally, are you seriously suggesting that because university professors tend to have certain political views we need to fix this by cutting university funding? I must be missing something because this makes no sense.
Also, the OP's made a very broad claim that most university departments are rife with ideology and hostile to conflicting views. You are referring to some instances of ridicule relating to the specific subject of political views, which is a much much weaker claim.
PS. I believe there's research that shows that the political leanings of professors has little effect on the political views of students. And I'm sorry that you were ridiculed and I think this is unacceptable behavior.
"So, California is cutting library funding instead of, you know, anything else."
The state budget has forced cuts in many departments. We're talking a $12 million cut to libraries. Higher education has been cut hundreds of millions of dollars.
The article then goes on to claim that higher education serve poor people "at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all." The next sentence says "Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher." If not all university students are middle class or higher then it is benefitting lower class students. Why say "if at all" when the next sentence implies that some poor people are helped? Does the author want professors to be poor? Of course most professors are middle class or higher. I expect all of them to be.
Then there is this statement: "The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary." This sentence, together with the sentence before it, suggests the author thinks this is a bad thing. Some students fail out of engineering. This is a good thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of work.
Libraries should be open for everyone. Universities should not grant degrees to everyone. The functions of libraries and universities are disparate. It's fine to think one is more important than the other. It's sloppy to not take into consideration the differences in focus between the two entities.
Theory can be learned from a book, but it's not necessarily easy for everyone. Only highly-motivated self-learners can teach themselves a subject, and then they must take on the additional work required to cut through "information space" to find exactly the texts they need. I don't think even a quarter of university students today have the capacity to learn in this manner, completely detached from the university system.
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors. Outside of a few IRC channels, they don't even exist for chem/bio. (You can't cite databases--they are too complicated for new learners.)
If we want a more autodidactic society, a lot of changes have to be made to early childhood education. Additionally, we have to provide a lot of tools (guided curriculum to keep learners on track, etc.) to support this manner of learning.
CS students are very lucky. We have mailing lists, IRC, HN/proggit, stackoverflow, good tools, documentation and tutorials freely accessible. These resources aren't as plentiful or accessible for other STEM majors.
You're right, and we should fix that. People interested in other STEM fields shouldn't be forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years to gain access to this knowledge.
They don't. The vast majority of my physics knowledge was gained for a few hundred bucks, most of it going to whoever publishes $MAJOR_PHYSICS_TOPIC, by Landau and Lifshitz.
What I paid $30-40k for was certification that I had this knowledge.
We really need to separate certification/credentialing from education. This is the main thing that will allow innovation in education - people need to buy the credential, and since it's bundled with education, they have no choice but to buy unnecessary education.
Also, it is not only about learning, but having access to cutting edge research in the same building that you are learning in. If all you did in college was go to class and then went back home, then you missed out on one of the biggest opportunities you have in life. A lot of your time should also be spent trying to learn as much as possible from some of the top researchers in their field by volunteering time in their labs.
* Edit: grammar
The way I see it, libraries are so incredible, and so important, that even the mighty university should be cut before libraries are.
To the extent that university education produces private goods (specific career training, credentials, etc.) there is a lot weaker argument for public funding.
The argument for public funding of universities is mostly not about it being a social safety net or producing equality of opportunity, at least not before the early 1990s or so, so that university students are generally from middle class or higher isn't as relevant.
Yes, you will always have your pulp fiction, but if a library's job is to disseminate knowledge to the masses, doesn't that make libraries reliant on a source to develop that knowledge?
Still I agree with another commenter. The real issue is why we spend so much money subsidizing corporations as well as our foreign adventures and the drug war. All of which are not sustainable in the long run.
Sure, cutting something as important as state libraries sucks, but you'd be pretty naive to think that shifting the cuts to any other sector wouldn't result in the same amount of job losses.
Libraries may offer other services than just the loaning of books and dvd's but in that case community centers will appear or other businesses to fill those needs.
I know some people don't have access to the internet or a computer but that is changing. I don't think libraries will disappear overnight but they are going (as we know them).
As much as I love libraries, I hardly visit one thanks to the thousands (millions?) of public domain books I can get free straight to my Kindle. The only thing I would want to visit a library for would be books like O'Reilly books, but my college pays a subscription to Safari Books that allows students access to literally thousands of such books completely free; O'Reilly, Apress, etc. so my thirst is quenched for now. The beauty is that as soon as a new book is published, it's on the site. And there aren't HTML3 books from the 90's still wasting (virtual) shelf space like my library.
Random thought, but that could be the future of the library. What if a little bit of tax money went toward an online directory like Safari Books instead of a huge expensive library building? Always updated, easy access, and a much wider selection? I'd go for it. I guess baby boomers wouldn't though.
Indirect state (and federal) funding, in the form of scholarships, grants, and loans, is one of the reasons tuition is so high in the first place.
If student loans weren't so plentiful colleges wouldn't cost 10-50k a year, because no one would pay.
'Comparisons are odious' as they say....
Of course they are not the same thing. So why are we comparing them as if they were? Rather than identifying a library's strengths and comparing that directly to universities, you should identify a library's strengths and a university's strengths, and compare the two sets.
I didn't set out to identify a library's strengths. I believe many of the university's supposed strengths are actually better applicable to libraries.
1. Colleges have their own libraries
2. Cost of tuition is way more important to him/her
How much information is in a library that can't be found elsewhere online? Now what about the other way around, though. How well can advanced college topics be taught with a book from a library?
I know the answer to this, and it makes me a bit sad. It's easy for Americans to resent their university system because, at least in CS, it is arguable that they don't actually need it. In some cases, it even hurts American kids. But before we all jump on this bandwagon (again) let's consider that we are perhaps being a bit myopic.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research. What would the world be without transactional databases, A* search, quicksort, cryptography, the idea of programming languages and so on ad infinatum. I could probably fill up literally a whole book listing the things in CS that were invented at Universities. There are more for other fields. You might contend that they all would have been invented eventually, but the question still remains: what would the world look like if universities had not been around to foster these ideas? New ideas need friends, and Bell labs can't employ all the geniuses.
I know, I know, you might contend that most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless. Unfortunately, you'd be right. But remember, that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big. Not just in universities, either: ideas produced by universities (for example, the ones I listed above) have changed the way that the world operates at a fundamental level, and they continue to do this. And when people come to universities and engage in work related to it, they carry it home, they carry it to their job, and they carry it out of the country. This is the way the world works. I know HN hates this opinion, but it is true.
The other thing I want to mention is that the vast majority of these life-changing ideas come out of American universities. This is a truly global system now. People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries? The simple and fact of the matter is that not all talented people are born in the US, and American universities are a very important gateway to get talented people into the US. In contrast, the library system is a purely domestic product for the public that happens to be inside US. I know that you think that universities don't "help the poor", but consider that this is really only true for the domestic poor. They are an irreplaceable resource for the poor outside. I'm not pitting "our" poor against "their" poor, but it's just something to think about.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them, since they do exist, and people clearly mostly do not.
The bottom line is this: your points all have some grain of truth to them, or they are true outright. But when you don't bother to examine why this system exists to begin with before you state that another systems should be preferred, you are undermining your own point in a huge way. In particular, to say that we should toss an incredibly important and global system for some domestic system that people don't use is utterly wrong. That all said, the correct answer is: cut neither, and instead cut part of the military.
In the first place, libraries are a great repository of knowledge. But knowledge does not equal production, and whether you or I or anyone else here wants to admit it, a tremendous amount of stuff has been invented, either totally, or almost totally, as a component of university research.
I don't mind admitting some useful things have come out of universities. But this doesn't mean we need to continue propping up the university system as it exists today. You admit it has many flaws. There are plenty of ways to bring smart people together to learn and do research. They could be nonprofit; they could be separate from teaching or integrated with it. You could even call them "universities" if you like. But there's no reason they have to resemble the current monster.
True, most research in universities is either pointless or close to pointless, but that's the Zipf curve. The ideas that are big are really, really big.
Sure, but the university system isn't sold that way. We're meant to believe the research done in universities is all useful.
People come from all over the world to study here, and when they do, they sometimes stay here. Do people come to America to study at libraries?
Universities have special privileges when it comes to fostering immigration. If America had world-class research centers with the same privileges, people would still love to come here and they'd be able to do so.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that the fact that libraries are a useful repository of knowledge does not mean that it will make people productive. Universities are not good at this either, but the consistent usership of public libraries is pitifully small. The fact that they exist does not mean that people will use them.
As you point out, universities aren't very good at this. Maybe a lot of people won't use libraries, and many who do won't be very productive. But as you suggested in one of your other points, the instances that pay off really pay off. And libraries do this much more efficiently than universities, in terms of money spent. There are a lot of university students burning tens of thousands of dollars without learning very much.