Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars
How come nobody asks whether what these people are teaching is actually useful stuff.  I mean useful in the sense that someone would voluntarily pay money for it with full knowledge of the benefits.<p>I have not been impressed with the colleges in the Bay Area and Sacramento.  Except for some programs in the UC system and Stanford, the vast majority of educational programs seem to be run for the benefit of administrators.  Neither the teachers nor the students reap many benefits.<p>The career offices for many programs practice deception to hide the ball when it comes to the prospects of alumni of their programs.  Many programs teach a curriculum that is irrelevant to employers, and when challenged claim they are &quot;teaching you to learn&quot;.  What a hollow fucking claim.  How do we test that claim?  They are teaching us to learn INDEED!  Why don&#x27;t they teach themselves how to teach something useful first!<p>As a Senior in college I TAed an intro engineering course at an Ivy League school.  A couple decades later a friend of a friend, who was dean of students at a for-profit, needed a teacher at the last minute for a subject I&#x27;m an expert at, and so I helped her out by teaching a night class after work, two days a week, for a semester.<p>The latter experience was eye-opening.  Most of my students should not have been there.  They were paying $25,000 a year or more in fees.  They were hardly prepared to tackle high school material, much less 4th year college material.  The for-profit institution was happy enough to continue taking their money while delivering nothing tangible.  Most of the teachers there were living hand to mouth themselves.  Some of them former students.  It was a scam through and through.  Nothing useful was being taught.  There were no employers lining up to hire these kids.<p>Basically, federal student loans are being funneled to &quot;teachers&quot; that should probably not be teaching, because they don&#x27;t have anything useful to teach.<p>We have to shed this societal delusion that it costs $25,000 per year to read books in a room with a person leading the class.  It does not cost that much.  It should not cost that much.  This is doubly true if the books being read&#x2F;taught are non-technical.<p>We really need a Universal Basic Income.  Most of the people involved in this educational industrial complex are just unemployable.  Let&#x27;s not allow them to pass on the same unemployable skill set to another generation because they need to have a salary to live.  They should just be paid off and it should be a separate exercise from education.