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Eugine_Nier comments on Rationality Quotes June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Nassim Taleb
I would be interested to know how well documented this "curse of success" is? Is it studied in the economic literature? When do corporations, nations, firms, individuals suffer from this curse, when do they not? When do entire industries--like universities-- suffer from the curse? When do they survive and recover? When do they go completely bust? It seems possible to find examples going both ways, so I'm guessing there's something more subtle going on.
I'd love to see Taleb actually prove his assertion here, rather than expecting his readers' cynicism and bitterness to do the work of evidence.
Do you really doubt that universities used to take smaller fees and now sell degrees for a large cost?
I certainly doubt the latter portion. From my observations, whether the professoriat at any given university cares about teaching well or not has little to do with their funding sources.
The professoriat is not the university. That, actually, is one of the changes in academia that entangles with the quote above: universities are becoming money-making machines and the professoriat becomes the proletariat -- nothing more than salaried employees (notice what's happening to tenure).
Though it would be weird if that were what Taleb was talking about: he has nothing but contempt for the institution of tenure (I think another of Eugine's quotes makes that clear). For Taleb, the proletarianization of professors is a good thing, and presumably he doesn't think that this is the cause of the degeneration (if there is in fact any) of higher education.
True, it's more likely to be a consequence.
If you see yourself primarily as a business with the task of exchanging cheapest-to-deliver services for money, an ossified and unyielding labor force is something you very much do not want.
I suspect that the root of the problem goes to the fact that the universities are supposed to be both centers of research and teaching institutions. It worked well on small scale when the few students were, basically, professors' apprentices. But it doesn't work well for the delivery of education to the masses.
In my estimation (having worked at several universities of various size and prestige, and more recently having consulted at all sorts of businesses) the problem is a common problem in a lot of American business/government since the 1970s/80s- the rise of professional management.
At large flagship U down the street from my house, professor labor costs have dropped markedly (the trend has been to replace tenure track lines with adjuncts and grad students as well as to increase grant overhead. In the science departments, many professors turn a net profit because grant overhead is larger than their salary costs). Enrollment is way up, tuition is way, way up. A drive to leverage university held patents has created massive profits for the university (with some absurdity along the way- a professor tried to start a company only to get a cease and desist order from a semi-conductor company. The university had sold the rights to his research to the semi-conductor company.)
And yet- the university finds itself on the verge of bankruptcy- why? Because management has exploded. The university now has a fellowship office (staffed entirely by managers who add no direct value), not one, but two bureaucratic offices devoted to education quality (how many people does it take to administer teacher feedback forms? Apparently about 20, of which several make more than 100k a year (roughly 5x an adjunct teaching a full load of 10 courses). Twenty years ago, all of the deans were tenured professors who rotated into the job for a few years, now all but one are outside hires who are deans full time. The last president they hired made an absurd amount of money, and brought with him several subordinates all making 150k+ a year. I often wonder how that negotiation went- "I need not only my salary, but I need these extra people to do the parts of the job I don't like."
The problem is insidious- you hire some managers to deal with work no one wants to do. But then, they start hiring people to deal with work THEY don't want to do, so on and so on. Pretty soon all your recent hires have nothing to do with the core competency of your business and they are eating all your profit from within. Its also damn near impossible to get rid of them, because by this point all the hiring and firing that no one wanted to deal with has become their domain.
Its not just education, I've consulted with companies that have more IT project managers than developers, that spend more money on medical benefits-management then they would have spent if they simply paid every claim that walked through the door,etc.
I would call it "being taken over by bureaucracy", but I basically agree.
At private companies the bureaucracy is constrained by market pressures (unless the company finds a particularly juicy spot at the government trough), but for colleges and universities these pressures have been largely absent. Until now.
I expect the next decade to be pretty painful for, um, institutions of higher learning.
I disagree- you'd be amazed how inefficient you can be and still be profitable. Lots of very large companies are being strangled by their bureaucracy even while remaining at least somewhat profitable (generally the existence of a huge company is all-in-itself a barrier to entry for competitors). I've worked for a surprising number of companies that have the basic problem of "I used to be very profitable, but now I find I'm slightly less profitable despite selling more products at higher margins." Even worse, I've seen attempts to solve the problem derailed by the same management apparatus.
A former boss was fond of blaming MBAs. He had a saying something along the lines of- the core problem with MBAs is the idea that you can good at "business" without being good at any particular business. MBAs march in, say "we need to quantify these decisions" and add a ton of process (which invites the managers in). A decade later, they notice that despite generally better conditions they aren't as profitable, they higher some big data consultants to come in and we say things like "you are spending $x+100 dollars to better quantify decisions that are only worth $x, and thats not even counting all the time you waste for all the paperwork that the process requires."
Maybe not, though I would like to see some statistics on that. My prior on this is that education has probably followed the pattern of pretty much every other good thing in 1st world society: it is decade by decade both better and more widely available than it ever has been before.
To clarify, I am not making claims here about how well the higher education works. I am saying that the structure of the US universities where faculty are hired on the basis of their ability to do original research (well, kinda sorta, it's really the ability to publish) but are expected to teach, often pretty basic stuff to pretty stupid undergrads, that structure is suboptimal.
And the changes are easy to see: tenure is becoming harder and harder to get, while adjuncts (who are generally expected to have a Ph.D. but are not expected to do research) are multiplying on all campuses.
Some problems with your perception of American academia:
Ability to publish gets you to the interview stage, the rest is good old-fashioned politics.
Adjuncts are still expected to publish, unless they have no interest at all in upward mobility.
Of course the structure is suboptimal, but no one's really come up with a better alternative.
I don't think that's the evidence-needing assertion in that quote.