While you are obviously speaking about the american system, this exact phrase is true for the Dutch government as a whole.

I am sure if it was built up from the ground today it would require only 10-20% of the current amount of employees, and the government would work better and faster on any topic.

However, in the government in holland a manager gets paid more if he has more people to manage, so if he cuts costs by eliminating useless jobs, he gets paid less.

Setup for disaster. Even if you could radically change the way things work, it would add about 4-8% of the entire population out of a job and into welfare, so it will never happen. Long term there would obviously be only benefits, as you could not only cut costs by a ton, but also make our wages competitive with the rest of Europe again because the market will be flooded with employees for the coming years.

Great stuff to think about, but sadly it won't ever happen .

Watching the Lederer files

These are boring as ****, and Lederer, and a lot of major people, are pieces of ****

As a voice from the inside: it's not simple.

Actually the more I listen to the Lederer files, I feel like he really is telling the truth.

I think he was uninformed, and probably lazy, but some of the other guys are really bastards.

There's still a giant hole in his story where "And I didnt notice, but sometime around June we were missing 200 million"

Like, HOW THE **** DO YOU MISS THAT

I'm fairly friendly with a professor/assistant director of my major and we had a couple hour discussion about what was mainly my gripes with the college way and he was aware and wanted to change most of the issues. He really helped me understand why it's so hard to change though. The bureaucracy that's involved in something as simple as adding a class to teach is ridiculous, let alone trying to deal with professors who are tenured but don't bring much value to the school or students anymore. He started teaching an iOS development class this semester that he had started the process of getting added to the school FOUR years ago. It's just insane to think that four years ago he petitioned to have this class added, yet it's just now getting implemented. He was pretty sympathetic to tenured teachers though which was slightly annoying. His argument was that they gave up a lot of ev by doing the teacher route as opposed to a career in their respective fields, so it's fair-ish that they get tenured, it's a compromise. The problem I have with that is it's kind of a ticket to being mediocre with students once you become tenured. I have had a couple of older teachers that don't really seem to keep up with the evolving trends in web dev which really makes the quality of the classes suffer. He was also quick to point out that a lot of the classes I've taken are actually net losses to teach me and can only be offered because of programs like psychology. It kind of blew my mind that a class of 60 or so students paying 2500/semester in tuition for four classes could become a net loss, but the amount of people involved in bringing me those four classes is also pretty staggering. Professors, HR, Directors, Assistant Directors, Deans, Assistant Deans, Cleaning People, IT, etc etc etc...

TL;DR - Seems like everyone can agree it's not the most effective means of teaching higher education, it's just incredibly more complex than I once thought.

Argggh it really annoys me how tenure is abused these days. It's supposed to be a shield for professors to do controversial research, not to keep them from getting fired for doing bad work.

I realize, change is difficult no matter what business you're in. What it's going to take is a new breed of schools that are equally respected by employers. The old establishment is too deep in their ways to make bold changes.

Wraths- yeah, and that just scratches the surface. Speaking of pay, for instance, look at how much a typical incoming professor makes in terms of student tuition some day.

Ike- not just research, also teaching. It is no joke that state legislatures in many places would fire people for teaching evolution if they could. Also, tenure is an absolute farce in many parts of academia. Think back to your time at Michigan. What do you think would happen to an early-career-but-tenured bioengineering prof who didn't get any grants for several years? Tenure or no, they're going to lose their job.

LT22- you may be right. I kind of hope you're wrong, because I really hope I can make places like my school relevant. I think that, at the very least, the top tier (top couple of tiers?) of the current schools will survive and be a net benefit for several more decades.

As far as new paradigms go, I hope people don't boot the current system before they have something that works provably. A lot of the current hot trends strike me as things that will work wonderfully for the best students, but be miserable failures for the average/below average students.

Also, the tenure == job security == justification for low pay thing is not easily overlooked. You'd have to pay me a whole hell of a lot more to work as an at will employee. I love to teach, but I'd absolutely jump ship and work in industry if you tried to offer me my current job without any sort of security.

imo learning for the sake of learning is worthwhile even without real world applications. Philosophy, historians and sociologists do actually have real world benefits but it's just not quite as direct. I remember learning that universities started as a way for the privileged to study these fine arts. At some point college turned into a trade school, something you have to do to get a job, which I think is a problem.

I don't have time to dig up the numbers now, but I don't think that time was too long ago. I think that, when my parents were growing up, there used to be quite a few decent jobs that you could get without a college degree. And trade schools used to be more prevalent and useful for getting good jobs. I think. I could be completely wrong, since I haven't done any looking into numbers.

Why is that a problem?

I could see how people can think business school sucks (which I would disagree with), but certainly anyone would rather have 10 engineers than 10 anything artsy.

The alternative would be that everyone starts with a grind of a job while being trained in a company. Not sure why we would want companies instead of professors to teach calculus to engineers, though.

So everyone has to study engineering, finance, business management or it's useless?

In my world, college is incredibly important. Places like Google and any investment bank on the planet hire almost entirely based on nepotism (perhaps not in the strict blood related sense) and undergrad school prestige. You'll see 'Graduated from a top tier university' in 99% of the job postings.

This really sucks because a lot of it starts in high school where your parents not only have to know how to motivate and push, but also how to be agressive with teachers to get you into all the right classes which are hopefully available at your (right) school.

The whole iBanking thing (which really isn't that hard - it's just a lot of hours) is then the real 'graduate degree' you need to get a lot of top tier jobs, or even get into a top tier b-school where they simply teach you how to act douchier and be an Excel snob (ewwww - you use the MOUSE on occasion? What a noob!).

Pretty much.

#embracingthecynicismofenlightenment

Yeah? Pack your sales team with engineers and let us know how it works out.

Because sales (business) is related to art?

One of my comp sci professors said there are benefits in hiring too - like, when deciding whether to hire someone, tenured professors don't have to worry about a super awesome candidate potentially taking their job someday, so they can make those evaluations in the best interest of the university rather than their own best interest.

Sales is about people and appealing to their interests and emotions. Art is about manipulating human emotions. Yah artsy types will be better at sales than engineers, I think everyone would lol if you denied that.

i think he assumed that you mentioning art encompasses any degree that is not engineering.

i deal with engineers all the time. i work in operations where anything business related occurs. my take on a majority of engineers is that they have a different way of thinking that does not correlate too well as to how a business functions. they are great at solving immediate technical problems but as far as understanding the social aspect of business in order to obtain material, deal with contracts, or financial impact, they don't quite understand.

I can only think of two large organizations that are substantially run by engineers: Google and China. Both efficiently run, slightly crazy, and with horrible customer relations.

so my father was in the airforce for a long time and retired about 10 years ago. he just showed me this hand book today and wanted to show me something in it that sort of blew my mind.



note the date Aug 1st 1999.

Inside was this picture:



9 tents? depiction of twin towers.. 9/11? what the fk?? kind of scratching my head at this one.

I am a BBA myself. I don't think I have anything more in common with philosophy students than with engineering students. My point was not that engineers can solve any problem.

My point remains that there are many programs that add very little value. There is no problem in that as long people pay for their own program like they have to in the states.

Denard is so bad against legit teams

You think the government planned 9/11 in 1999 and decided to leave a clue in an airforce manual? It's obviously just a coincidenc

i never said i thought the govt planned it so when i saw this i thought it was pretty ironic.

but what makes you so sure?