There is an enormously strong anticorrelation between lifespan and reproduction. Where are birthrates highest? Places like Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, and other such places. Where are they lowest? Places like Japan and Germany, where women both have access to roles in society other than babymakers and where they can expect to live long, healthy lives.
I bet if the average Somali woman could look forward to a century of fulfilling life she'd have fewer kids.
I agree with what you're saying, though -- with a few exceptions, it's not poor Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, etc. coming here for an education. (Grad school is a bit different, of course.)
A professor/grad-student team costs $125k for a year. In that time, they will teach five classes. If each has 40 students, that's 200 student-classes (600 credit-hours, if you want) for $125k.
It doesn't matter that they may be five sections of the same class; what matters is the number of credit hours of instruction you get for that $125k, since as you point out what's really going on is that there are ten such teams, with an aggregate salary of $1.25M, teaching five sections each of ten classes, for a total of 2000 student-classes.
If a student takes ten classes a year, then the professor-student ratio is 1:20 (either 10/200 or 10/2000 * 10, however you like to see it), so each student's yearly tuition has to be 1/20 the yearly pay of a professor+grad student, or $6250.
I allowed for another $6250 for all that overhead you mentioned, for the total of $12.5K. Not sure where food comes in (it's not included in tuition).
"The government" doesn't have magic amounts of money -- they take it from us. But I agree with your overall point, and think that it is worth paying tax money for education. I was encouraging great-grandparent to realize that you can't get something for nothing, and that those low-interest-rate student loans only happen because someone else is spotting you.
I ardently agree with you on your second point: if the government is backing loans it should also make them. "Socialized risk, privatized profit" is the essence of crony capitalism, which is a horrible thing.
This is true -- they only shut down the above-ground stations during the "snowquester" this year (but it was substantially less than half a foot).
Totally with you on the bad drivers. Arizona drivers handle snow better, in the fucking cactus capital of the world. And the city just is generally run by derps -- I mean, Marion Barry? *Still* one of the most powerful men in the city?
There are lots of English departments that have cut standards based on both the quality of entering freshmen and a "gotta protect students' self-esteem" mentality. I'm in physics, where we don't normally grade based on grammar, but at one point the professor I was grading for said "Look, this is ridiculous. Just go full grammar-nazi on next week's reports." It was a bloodbath.
The trouble is that the population of administrators at universities is increasing faster than cockroaches on week-old pizza. And administrators aren't even free once they take their salaries, as they come up with other nonsense that also costs money.
Tenured professors don't necessarily get outrageous salaries. I looked up one of my professors in graduate school: late-career full professor, solid international reputation, great researcher, great teacher. He made $110K or so -- far below what he'd be worth to private industry.
The cost of a university is a lot greater than it needs to be, though.
Let's say a professor costs $100K/year and a graduate student costs $25K/year, and that together a professor and a graduate student can teach five classes of 40 students a year. (These aren't perfect numbers, but this is a back-of-envelope calculation.) If a student takes ten classes a year, that means that the professor+graduate student:undergraduate ratio has to be 20:1, which is paid for by tuition of $6250/year.
Even if you assume that it costs this much again to keep the lights on, mop the floors, buy chalk, and the like, the gap between $12.5K/year and the $40K+ that some places charge is just ridiculous. Where does the money go?
Then who is going to put up the money to loan to students? A loan agreement has to be mutually beneficial to both borrower and lender. If I am going to loan it to a student, there has to be some reason for me to do so rather than loan it to the doctor wanting to borrow money to buy an X-ray machine to treat broken arms, or the young couple wanting to borrow money to buy a house.
I don't see how someone can give informed consent to any kind of debt contract without understanding the exponential nature of compound interest. Seriously: don't let people borrow money at interest unless they can sit down with a pencil (or Excel, or whatever) and compute how much they'll pay back over the term of the loan, or otherwise demonstrate an understanding of how it works.
OT: I was in Germany recently and asked a German student about their tax rates. He said that they had a 40-50% income tax and 19% VAT. Sweden has a reputation as an even more comprehensive welfare state than Germany; is that a false reputation, or are Swedes just wealthier than Germans so a 30% tax rate goes further?
It costs money to teach classes, and professors have to get paid. Ironically I can see teaching being cheaper for major universities, since they can offload some of the work onto graduate students, who are cheaper than professors. (I'm not criticizing the practice; I was a very happy graduate teaching assistant for many years, and I think GTA's can do a fine job.)
Completely true. I don't really care so much about the choice between "low taxes, few services" and "high taxes, many services", but what we have now is "moderate taxes, low services, giant military". That's far worse than the other two.
This is why the US is getting its face planted by Russia, China, Brazil, Venezuela, and Germany. You don't eat your planting seed.
I'm sitting here in my office at one of those maligned US universities, as a lowly postdoctoral researcher.
The desk next to mine has a Chinese graduate student moving in next week. My supervisor is Romanian (ex-Soviet bloc). My former officemate's girlfriend is another graduate student, a wonderful Chinese woman. Next office over is biophysics -- one Indian and a bunch of Chinese folks. Over half of the grad students are Chinese, and another of the new ones is Russian.
Where I did my PhD, we also had lots of Chinese students around, along with a German, a Brazilian, a few Russians, some Indians, a South African, two Frenchwomen, and a Mexican.
If the US is doing such a bad job compared to all these countries, why are they still coming here to study and work? The US isn't perfect, but we're not bad, either.
Japan, Europe, and China have vastly different population densities than the US.
The bit of the US that is like Japan and Europe -- the Northeast Corridor -- already does that. There is a rather nice train that runs from Washington DC up to Boston (roughly), with quite a few trains per day. It's quite a bit like European trains.
But most of the US isn't like that: short of the NEC, most of the US is a land of cities separated by vast stretches of farmland and wilderness. Atlanta to Tucson, to pick two random cities in the rest of the country, is 1750 miles (roughly the distance from Paris to Moscow), without all that many people in between (the only cities of any appreciable size along the route are San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, and New Orleans). It just doesn't make sense to take a train from Atlanta to Tucson.
Far more people saw the transistor and knew you could make a radio out of it than saw the Schroedinger equation and knew you could make a transistor out of it.
Schedule I drugs are not drugs with no medical use.
Schedule I drugs are drugs that a particular government organization has *decided* have no medical use. This isn't a scientific claim; it's a political one.
The most blatant example is heroin, which is Schedule I in the USA but used in much the same way as morphine in the UK.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an enormously strong anticorrelation between lifespan and reproduction. Where are birthrates highest? Places like Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, and other such places. Where are they lowest? Places like Japan and Germany, where women both have access to roles in society other than babymakers and where they can expect to live long, healthy lives.
I bet if the average Somali woman could look forward to a century of fulfilling life she'd have fewer kids.
I agree with what you're saying, though -- with a few exceptions, it's not poor Chinese, Indians, Brazilians, etc. coming here for an education. (Grad school is a bit different, of course.)
Math again in more detail.
A professor/grad-student team costs $125k for a year. In that time, they will teach five classes. If each has 40 students, that's 200 student-classes (600 credit-hours, if you want) for $125k.
It doesn't matter that they may be five sections of the same class; what matters is the number of credit hours of instruction you get for that $125k, since as you point out what's really going on is that there are ten such teams, with an aggregate salary of $1.25M, teaching five sections each of ten classes, for a total of 2000 student-classes.
If a student takes ten classes a year, then the professor-student ratio is 1:20 (either 10/200 or 10/2000 * 10, however you like to see it), so each student's yearly tuition has to be 1/20 the yearly pay of a professor+grad student, or $6250.
I allowed for another $6250 for all that overhead you mentioned, for the total of $12.5K. Not sure where food comes in (it's not included in tuition).
"The government" doesn't have magic amounts of money -- they take it from us. But I agree with your overall point, and think that it is worth paying tax money for education. I was encouraging great-grandparent to realize that you can't get something for nothing, and that those low-interest-rate student loans only happen because someone else is spotting you.
I ardently agree with you on your second point: if the government is backing loans it should also make them. "Socialized risk, privatized profit" is the essence of crony capitalism, which is a horrible thing.
Because there are lots of people in the world other than Americans?
He's a computational physicist.
This is true -- they only shut down the above-ground stations during the "snowquester" this year (but it was substantially less than half a foot).
Totally with you on the bad drivers. Arizona drivers handle snow better, in the fucking cactus capital of the world. And the city just is generally run by derps -- I mean, Marion Barry? *Still* one of the most powerful men in the city?
There are lots of English departments that have cut standards based on both the quality of entering freshmen and a "gotta protect students' self-esteem" mentality. I'm in physics, where we don't normally grade based on grammar, but at one point the professor I was grading for said "Look, this is ridiculous. Just go full grammar-nazi on next week's reports." It was a bloodbath.
The trouble is that the population of administrators at universities is increasing faster than cockroaches on week-old pizza. And administrators aren't even free once they take their salaries, as they come up with other nonsense that also costs money.
Tenured professors don't necessarily get outrageous salaries. I looked up one of my professors in graduate school: late-career full professor, solid international reputation, great researcher, great teacher. He made $110K or so -- far below what he'd be worth to private industry.
The cost of a university is a lot greater than it needs to be, though.
Let's say a professor costs $100K/year and a graduate student costs $25K/year, and that together a professor and a graduate student can teach five classes of 40 students a year. (These aren't perfect numbers, but this is a back-of-envelope calculation.) If a student takes ten classes a year, that means that the professor+graduate student:undergraduate ratio has to be 20:1, which is paid for by tuition of $6250/year.
Even if you assume that it costs this much again to keep the lights on, mop the floors, buy chalk, and the like, the gap between $12.5K/year and the $40K+ that some places charge is just ridiculous. Where does the money go?
Then who is going to put up the money to loan to students? A loan agreement has to be mutually beneficial to both borrower and lender. If I am going to loan it to a student, there has to be some reason for me to do so rather than loan it to the doctor wanting to borrow money to buy an X-ray machine to treat broken arms, or the young couple wanting to borrow money to buy a house.
I don't see how someone can give informed consent to any kind of debt contract without understanding the exponential nature of compound interest. Seriously: don't let people borrow money at interest unless they can sit down with a pencil (or Excel, or whatever) and compute how much they'll pay back over the term of the loan, or otherwise demonstrate an understanding of how it works.
That's a great analogy.
OT: I was in Germany recently and asked a German student about their tax rates. He said that they had a 40-50% income tax and 19% VAT. Sweden has a reputation as an even more comprehensive welfare state than Germany; is that a false reputation, or are Swedes just wealthier than Germans so a 30% tax rate goes further?
It costs money to teach classes, and professors have to get paid. Ironically I can see teaching being cheaper for major universities, since they can offload some of the work onto graduate students, who are cheaper than professors. (I'm not criticizing the practice; I was a very happy graduate teaching assistant for many years, and I think GTA's can do a fine job.)
Completely true. I don't really care so much about the choice between "low taxes, few services" and "high taxes, many services", but what we have now is "moderate taxes, low services, giant military". That's far worse than the other two.
This is why the US is getting its face planted by Russia, China, Brazil, Venezuela, and Germany. You don't eat your planting seed.
I'm sitting here in my office at one of those maligned US universities, as a lowly postdoctoral researcher.
The desk next to mine has a Chinese graduate student moving in next week. My supervisor is Romanian (ex-Soviet bloc). My former officemate's girlfriend is another graduate student, a wonderful Chinese woman. Next office over is biophysics -- one Indian and a bunch of Chinese folks. Over half of the grad students are Chinese, and another of the new ones is Russian.
Where I did my PhD, we also had lots of Chinese students around, along with a German, a Brazilian, a few Russians, some Indians, a South African, two Frenchwomen, and a Mexican.
If the US is doing such a bad job compared to all these countries, why are they still coming here to study and work? The US isn't perfect, but we're not bad, either.
For a lot of K-12 programs, that's true.
Japan, Europe, and China have vastly different population densities than the US.
The bit of the US that is like Japan and Europe -- the Northeast Corridor -- already does that. There is a rather nice train that runs from Washington DC up to Boston (roughly), with quite a few trains per day. It's quite a bit like European trains.
But most of the US isn't like that: short of the NEC, most of the US is a land of cities separated by vast stretches of farmland and wilderness. Atlanta to Tucson, to pick two random cities in the rest of the country, is 1750 miles (roughly the distance from Paris to Moscow), without all that many people in between (the only cities of any appreciable size along the route are San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, and New Orleans). It just doesn't make sense to take a train from Atlanta to Tucson.
The Washington DC subway was shut down by just a few inches of snow this year, but then it is run by bozos.
If you read my post, and parsed it according to the standard rules of English grammar, you'd realize that that was precisely what I was saying.
Far more people saw the transistor and knew you could make a radio out of it than saw the Schroedinger equation and knew you could make a transistor out of it.
You mean an iDot . ?
Yes, this ------> . is an iDot. It's like a period, but a very small rounded rectangle instead of a circle.
You now owe Apple royalties.
Schedule I drugs are not drugs with no medical use.
Schedule I drugs are drugs that a particular government organization has *decided* have no medical use. This isn't a scientific claim; it's a political one.
The most blatant example is heroin, which is Schedule I in the USA but used in much the same way as morphine in the UK.
There isn't one. This is a real problem in states that don't support citizen initiatives.