university funding / how do your universities work

[Ben]

let us also not ignore that credit based and time based are not necessarily different- you could easily take grue's argument and say "okay so instead of, you have 8 years taking 20 credits/year, you now have 160 credits. if you have used up your credits dawdling and havent fulfilled the requirements of your major then we consider this a problem". in this way, niki's concern that you need to slow down for personal reasons is addressed as long as theyre focused well enough on the object and have the stamina for it (im not saying this is a solution id enact personally, just thinkin along the lines of you people discussing it) (note: by the time i finished writing this, niki said essentially this i think but im not gonna delete it)

i think another thing not being mentioned with respect to art degrees is that, it is very true that those more abstract things are just as important and hold different, not lesser, value to us- but i also think that it is simply much harder to have an autodidactical career in engineering than it is to have one in the arts. im talking very specifically about studio art, writing, film, etc. i would go as far as to say that academia as an institution can strangle beauty and individuality and creativity in a way that would be unhealthy to people whose focus is these things. my reticence to give them the same ground comes from this discrepancy

grue makes a good point about people "wasting" their education- we want people to be educated, whether they choose to fix cars with it or be an actor or jump off a cliff in the end.

i think the issue that he is touching on is that, if an education really is this 4, 6, 8-year thing and you stop in the middle of it... what does that make you? arent the "degrees" defined by the completion of these requirements? are we funding you (in this scenario where university is funded publicly) to not accomplish? i mean, the economic idea here is just risk, right. you take a risk investing in these people so that they will produce something for society (be it art, engineering, teaching, a finely tuned automobile, a rad cliff jump) or for themselves. if they go "actually i was just here because i was pressured so im leaving" or "actually i was here to learn something that lead nowhere" or "actually im literally incapable of accomplishing what is necessary" and leave... then there is an issue that would not necessarily be detectable by whatever entrance conditions are in place