Interesting concept, I went ahead an ordered a copy on Amazon. Not sure when it will arrive as all my USPS stuff has seen a 5-7 day delay, but looks like it's worth exploring.
I actually declined all the offers to be included in several 'rush week' inductions, I despised 'campus life' by the end of my incoming Summer Freshman year. And the notion of 'paying for my friends' was not just alien to me, but counter intuitive as I was already living and working alongside Pro-drivers, Industry leaders in Motorsports by the time I was 17 and going to Industry parties and gatherings by 19.
Later in my upper division courses I found out how critical getting a passing grade was less about what you knew, then who you knew as the Frats were running exams. Funny enough, some of those Frats would also get caught in a Drug Sting by the Federal Government that year, too.
I have been thinking about this lately. It started a while back when someone was asking me about which data science programs they were considering was best. I suggested NYU because of LeCun. Then recently I was discussing how having Google on your resume is a bit like having an ivy league university on your resume.
That got me thinking, a huge part of the reason why some people fight/pay to get into the best universities is so they can get into the best companies. Isn't the university just a middle man at this point?
Then my next thoughts are mostly along the lines in what is discussed in this article.
Isn't that exactly what universities (at least top universities) are and always have been?
If you wanted to be a top cleric in the middle ages, you'd study in a university with the best manuscripts, the best scholars and the best clergy connections.
Whether you want to get into tech, academia or government you will try to get into the best universities because they have the best alumni network, the best resources and the best name recognition.
Now of course this only applies to extremely ambitious people (I don't think being ambitious is necessarily a good thing). Plenty of people are fine working at a regional bank. Plenty of people are fine living a simple, stable life in a local government administration. Those jobs can even be attractive to ambitious people, if you're a first generation immigrant from a dirt-poor background, a stable local government job with decent pay and benefits is certainly something worth striving for.
For such people a local community college will provide just the same level of knowledge and skills they'd get at a big name university.
I can't quite put my fingers on what's wrong with the article, but it rings to me as the perspective of someone who's only familiar with fancy colleges and has little knowledge (or care) for what actually goes on and who actually goes to smaller institutions.
There are two different pursuits tangled up in this. One is seeking money and prestige and the other is seeking knowledge. They are confused because in order to earn money you often need at least a modicum of specialised knowledge and prestige requires at least some proximity to or appearance of it. Conversely, pursuing knowledge requires you to acquire money to fund your endeavors and needs enough prestige to attract others to your cause. They are bound closely together but they are not the same thing.
> Isn't the university just a middle man at this point?
It is party credentialing, partly middle man, but I personally learned a lot and I think going to university gave me a lot. Then again, I live in a place where I did not had to go into lifelong debt for it.
We dont know how to do good online education yet. The biggest problem seem to be that people get demotivated and drop up in much higher rates then when they go to same course in person.
But even if we would, I dont think online education will solve problem of student debt. That did not happened because it would be impossible to provide affordable education or impossible to hire people from cheaper universities. The same pressures and systems that made in person education expensive, the same system that greatly favors students from few universities for prestigious positions will make online learning have the same problems.
> Then again, I live in a place where I did not had to go into lifelong debt for it.
The average Bachelor’s graduate in the US has $38K in debt the day they graduate. If you go in state to a state school you will on average pay even less. If you don’t get an expensive graduate degree in a field with no jobs you’re not going to be swimming in debt.
Afaik, biggest issue have people who did not gained degree. When they drop out, either because it is too hard or because they have personal problems or because they just don't feel like studying, they end up with debt and no degree.
The actual issue of "picked obviously bad degree with no jobs" is rather small. Most students go for practically sounding degree.
If the only purpose of becoming educated is to get a high-paying job, then sure.
If the purpose of education is to learn something about the world, become an informed citizen, and contribute to (or at the very least, become aware of) human intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements, then no, a tech company isn’t much of a substitute.
Unfortunately these two things have been conflated, lowering the value of both. Personally I would like to see the university split into two: one half technical education based on economic needs, the other half focused on educating people. St. John’s in Annapolis / Santa Fe seems like a good model for the latter.
Education for its own sake has always been a minority passion. Remember, universities started as trade schools for the clergy and then added trade schools for lawyers and physicians centuries before anything else.
Conflating real education with job training and certification of intelligence and conscientiousness does not lower the value of education but it does make training and certification easier to sell by adding some of the lustre and prestige of scholarship to trade. This is to education’s benefit. Without it there would be many fewer people studying fields with no jobs or very few like the Studies, Psychology or Physics.
There will always be those whose parents can afford to spend a lot of money on a finishing school. Everyone else will need to get a job and there’s not going to be much support for subsidizing that from those whose children aren’t going to attend.
1. Providing a well-rounded education is somehow impossibly expensive, whether with modern communication technologies like the Internet or paper books. Surely the solution is to make this education cheaper, not to simply get rid of it?
2. Ignoring the fact that a democracy doesn't work if citizens aren't educated. Quoting The Great Books of the Western World:
This answer...assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men.
The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, "at the height of his times." The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, "I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of "the world republic of learning."
Education for its own sake needn’t be expensive but trying to force it on the unwilling doesn’t work and makes things worse for those who actually want it by mixing in people who don’t actually care into their classes. If twelve years of primary and secondary school can’t awaken intellectual interests for more years in college won’t either. We know it doesn’t work for literature because most people don’t read for pleasure and those who do mostly don’t read literature. That is the easiest one besides possibly music, where again the academically favoured version is wildly less popular than what is generally consumed.
Forcing education on people does amazingly little to change their tastes.
If democracy doesn’t work if citizens aren't educated how did it work before universal primary or secondary education? The US, UK and France among others had a wide franchise long before a high school education was normative.
And education doesn’t even make informed citizens. Only 40% of the US population can name all three branches of government. Most people are ignorant of civics in all countries. You can’t make people retain information they neither use not care about but you can make their childhoods worse by wasting their time.
Forcing a simulacrum of education on the unwilling or unenthusiastic has low, low returns in knowledge.
At least in colonial and the early United States the colleges were originally heavily oriented to training the clergy. Medical training came later, and lawyers for some time were trained by being apprenticed to practicing lawyers, e.g. Abraham Lincoln.
Post Civil War, the four-year liberal arts education took on the role of finishing school for the children of the upper middle class. Vocational training was unnecessary, since they were expected to return, suitable spouse in tow, to the family business. The education, to the extent that it mattered, was to provide them with background for their role as leaders in society.
Students preparing for science, engineering, and the other grubbier majors were looked down upon, particularly the students from the lower classes on scholarship.
I don't buy the idea that being educated to be a productive person is not an education, or is somehow inferior.
I've seen too many non-STEM educated people who could really use a couple courses in statistics, what the scientific method is, how to discern gold from pyrite, what percentages mean, using data to find answers, distinguishing wealth from income, understanding exponential behavior, understanding what a chaotic system is, etc.
Besides, knowing what general relativity is just mind-bending (pun intended!).
I didn't say anything about STEM or non-STEM. Most of the things you listed would fall under scientific education (which I mentioned), not practical education. Knowing what general relativity is or how to discern gold from pyrite has nothing to do with the economics of getting a good job, which is what I am referring to.
> would fall under scientific education (which I mentioned), not practical education
The idea that scientific education is not practical is incorrect. For example, scientists contributed massively to the victory of WW2?
> Knowing what general relativity is or how to discern gold from pyrite has nothing to do with the economics of getting a good job
I used pyrite as a metaphor, it's colloquially known as fool's gold. Less delicately, learning how to distinguish shit from shinola. This is quite a valuable skill.
As for general relativity, the background needed to understand what it even is means your mind is trained, and this training is highly marketable and useful. Then being able to marvel at it is a wonderful thing, indeed.
To be fair, I have found quite a few people who studied STEM and managed to misunderstand statistic, are easily distracted by scientism while not knowing how science actually works, appear to not understand exponential growth last months and so on.
Science is not realy part of technological degrees. Some stem teaches it, other dont. Engineering is not science. It is something else.
Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either. They don't end up being able to pick samples and work with them nor understand statistical methods. They end up able to prove few conjectures.
I am not saying they should teach that, these are often not relevant to the degree.
> Science is not realy part of technological degrees.
Yes, it is. Technology is applied science. My degree is BSME - Bachelor of Science Mechanical Engineering. Freshman required classes for BSME were all science & math. Engineering classes came later, and were built on that foundation.
I don't understand where the notion that science is something else is coming from.
> Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either.
Statistics is foundational to technology. For example, you cannot compute the reliability of a design without understanding statistics.
> these are often not relevant to the degree
That is just not so.
Even so, a humanities degree does not include science or statistics.
How much of the prerequisite stats or math material are reinforced in actual software engineering? Even the more theoretical material of algorithms/data structures interviews doesn't really involve statistics. Maybe if the engineer works in data science, or scientific modeling, or in data compression.
I'm a recent CSE graduate. Up to Diff-eq w/ Linear Algebra + discrete math, mathematical statistics (discrete and continuous random variables with common distributions).
The heavier CS classes required lots of induction proofs, and the crypto classes were entirely probability oriented.
Sure, CS programs require math prereqs, my question is how long does that knowledge actually stick for most software engineers, as the majority of those jobs do not actually exercise it, not even during whiteboarding.
My main quibble is with the original post that supposed STEM degree holders are more rational than non-STEM degree holders, as being exposed to a subject during a semester or three in school doesn't guarantee retention after graduation if it goes unused.
It would be more interesting to look at Master's and PhD's than Bachelors, as the latter requires little more than attendance and some effort to cross the finishing line. The former have much stronger demands on internalization and domain expertise.
A large part of the drive to marketisation has been to destroy the part of the university that isn't technical training, since the part of the university engaged in thinking has a tendency to get political. The high point of the university as political venue was probably the late sixties; it was as recently as 1970 that the US sent in the Army to murder students.
> predicts hundreds, if not thousands, of brick-and-mortar universities will go out of business
That’s only possible in places where universities are businesses. Elsewhere (most of Europe for instance), it would be super easy to counter this trend: don’t give the new comers the national habilitations that make the awarded degrees recognized and thus worth something.
Universities in NL have been in the proces of becoming businesses over the last 20 years, as they have been made partially responsible for their own budget. And it shows.
Similar in the UK. It really came home to me when I was visiting universities with one of my children. We happened to walk past a marketing department during one of our tours. I was surprised by the number of people working in that office.
Learning to pass the test has failed us. Moving tests online won’t change that.
The future of education is not moving tests online. It’s no tests at all. The future of education is workshops.
Teachers as mentors, not lecturers and truancy officers. Exercises instead of lectures. Peers instead of tests. Projects instead of grades.
After completing a workshop, you have a project to show for it - not a score. After completing a workshop, you have an alumni network to draw on.
Workshops are self-directed. There’s a schedule to the exercises, but enough room for people to go at different paces. Students work in the open, and learn from each other. Students are encouraged to collaborate, instead of punished as cheaters. Students compete by seeing what’s possible.
Workshops are about learning to do great work, instead of learning to pass a test.
That was always a better idea. So what makes you think now is the time the world will move from its entrenched tradition and over to something more rational?
Over time people will avoid spending their time and money on something that provides little value. It's already happening. The generation growing up now has learned (the hard way) that tests and grades have little value in the real world. That it's a game, one that they don't enjoy and they don't need to win.
COVID-19 has just accelerated this by moving schools online and laying them bare. Online there's no having lunch together, flirting, or getting dressed up. Online there's none of the things that made school more than a test. As the schools move online people see the emperor has no clothes.
Honestly, my experience of school was not just listening obediently as much as people make it to be here. And talking with my kids, the school was not like that to them - they miss the interactive parts of class. Now that homework is send by mail, bulk of it is like you describe. But the zoom classes are not like that and based on what my kids claim, it was not as dry in person.
Maybe there are completely dystopian schools where no communication is going on. Everything exists somewhere. But it is just not true that it is universal experience of school.
The point of a college degree is that you have a document, form an accredited university, that represents that you have completed a course of study in a satisfactory way. As an employer hiring a new grad, you know, at a minimum "This person showed up to class for four years. They are capable of following instructions, of learning new material, and doing so above a baseline level of competency."
What does an employer get in your scenario? Four years of 'projects' to sift through? How do they know what a good deliverable looks like for a CS 61A class at Southeastern Louisiana State University?
No grades works great at Yale Law, when you're dealing with a group of the most talented and motivated young people on the planet. That will not work in a mass education system, where the need to make the grade is the only thing getting half of the kids out of bed in the morning.
> What does an employer get in your scenario? Four years of 'projects' to sift through? How do they know what a good deliverable looks like for a CS 61A class at Southeastern Louisiana State University?
As someone who participates in interviewing undergraduate candidates, I prefer those that have projects to talk about over those who tout their GPA. Project work correlates very well with aptitude and initiative.
Projects require deep understanding, research, trial and error, and fully integrative thinking. There's no better way to learn and grow.
Yes but that’s because the current education system is geared toward GPA. If all of the students you interview have years worth or projects, how would you differentiate? Better yet, if they go through a university or trade school and they all complete the same projects, how do you know who is actually good?
I’ve run into this when interviewing or going through resumes of entry-level engineers. A lot of them will have a similar senior capstone project, so now I’m back to looking at GPA or some other signal.
“Yes yes you worked on CMU’s autonomous vehicles program. So did the other 10 candidates, but tell me what makes you truly unique? “ etc.
> Yes yes you worked on CMU’s autonomous vehicles program. So did the other 10 candidates, but tell me what makes you truly unique?
We might be looking for different things.
I'm just looking to hire self-driven folks that know how to program, problem solve, and communicate. I'm not looking for pedigree, elite status, or anything of that sort. In fact, I don't even care if candidates went to college. If they can demonstrate that they know what they're doing, then that's fine by me.
I predict cookie cutter projects won't be an issue. If a candidate can talk in depth about their project, the choices they made, the things they learned - that's good signal. It doesn't matter if everyone performs the same exercise, because not everyone will come away with the same experience.
That seems like a reasonable approach. Do you recruit directly or do candidates get vetted before they get to you? I get the sense that in many hiring flows, the candidate would have to go through some gatekeepers first. They may be the ones screening for pedigree, elite status, etc.
> I predict cookie cutter projects won't be an issue. If a candidate can talk in depth about their project, the choices they made, the things they learned - that's good signal.
I'd argue most capable people will come away with largely the same experience.
Like you, I have a bias toward projects and self-motivated individuals. What I'm saying here is that right now you filter toward that, because everybody has a good GPA, so it's not as strong of a signal. If you change the education system so that everybody has great project experience, you're going to swing back to some other metric to filter people out (like GPA/prestige of university/training program/etc.).
I don't think you can ever really escape it.
In my example, everybody has great project experience and a great GPA. So how do I decide? Well, I start looking at other things like maybe they're the captain of the volleyball team.
Related question is, did you considered that most of them actually can be good for the job position in question? It is possible that majority of them would do reasonably well. In which case you are maybe wasting the time chasing for something special that you cant define.
And if they are not good, what it is exactly that they are missing? Then it makes sense to look for the specific thing most are missing. But it makes less sense to look for some special person without being able to define what special you look for and chasing random signals instead.
This is exactly the type of thing universities should not be for. We should create a separate institution that serves these needs without pretending to be a university. We literally need a trade school for people who just want a piece of paper that proves they can do what management tells them to. That isn't a university, it's just grades 13 through 16.
>As an employer hiring a new grad, you know, at a minimum "This person showed up to class for four years. They are capable of following instructions, of learning new material, and doing so above a baseline level of competency."
I was thinking about this point the other day. What made me question it is that everyone that goes to college went through 12 years of education that wasn't too dissimilar to that. But for whatever reason that is not considered.
A high school degree used to signal exactly that and enabled holders to get a “good job”. We mistook the map for the territory and insisted that everyone get a high school diploma, reasoning that this would enable everyone to get a good job. In doing so we destroyed the signal and the good job gatekeeper was moved to an undergrad degree. We are now in the process of doing the same thing again, and employers are starting to look for master’s degrees.
I don't know what GP wants, but projects can still be graded. And the project supervisor can assign a rough percentage breakdown of each project into subfields: 30% DLC, 40% programming, 30% technical writing. At the end of the program, you can collate these in a table to say things like 7 months spent on DLC across 5 projects with average grade of A-.
The lecture is still common in the college classroom, but there's been a lot of movement away from it over the last couple decades. For instance, I've for quite a few years now taught a data analysis class for economics majors, where the biggest part of the grade comes from a project rather than exams. Nonetheless, the lecture-exam approach will always be prominent. It's just a more efficient approach that works well enough for many purposes.
I agree with you in many ways. Lots of learning can happen much more effectively in a project environment. I would say about 70% of a modern STEM degree can be based on projects.
But lectures have their place. A lot of times, you need information transfer from someone who knows a lot to someone who knows little. I am in favor of video lectures with active learning components to self-test yourself.
Also, subjects like Mathematics, require a lot of practice of, perhaps, boring questions. While some practice can and should be done collaboratively, a lot of it has to be done individually. There is no substitute for that.
I know the bigger point you're making, but it has dawned on me recently that life after school is always about passing the test. Every interview that I've faced has required me to study in order to pass the test to get in.
Interesting read. His observation that there are many, many people who want to go to MIT and Stanford and would do great but didn't get in because they only have many seats, is spot on.
However, the flip side is that there exists lower-tier institutions because there are lots of people who would not do great. If you keep a Stanford education meaning what it means today then those folks would flunk.
Look at the MOOC experiments where the percentage of people who pass is in the single digits. (There are all kinds of arguments that some people only sign up for part of the course anyway, that people can take it three times at much less cost than the traditional way once, etc., but single digits is a shock.) There are lots of people who have the skills and motivation to succeed, which is wonderful. But there are also lots of people who will fail to swim, but who are now being helped by these other places.
> Look at the MOOC experiments where the percentage of people who pass is in the single digits. (There are all kinds of arguments that some people only sign up for part of the course anyway, that people can take it three times at much less cost than the traditional way once, etc., but single digits is a shock.)
Could you elaborate on this? I've done a couple of MOOCs recently (Coursera in conjuction with Columbia, Princeton, etc). I could see that tens of thousands of others had enrolled. I'm curious about what the completion rate is. I personally got some value out of them. I'm wondering why they might be considered failures. In fact I'm seeing lots more courses come up.
I think there may be considerable grade inflation once admitted to many top schools. After interviewing enough people from top schools, including Stanford, the assumption that they are inherently better and the content is more difficult has worn off.
> Look at the MOOC experiments where the percentage of people who pass is in the single digits. (There are all kinds of arguments that some people only sign up for part of the course anyway, that people can take it three times at much less cost than the traditional way once, etc., but single digits is a shock.) There
I personally signed up to many courses I did not even intended to finish. And even where I intended to finish, it turned out too much. I could do required 6-8 of work for first few weeks, but sooner or later there is deadline in work or personal problem that you have deal with and will stop the course. It was free and I learned something without finishing it anyway.
In one case, I dropped out from final test while having all previous homework done and full credit up to that point. I just decided that learning for final test would be too much effort an stopped.
Actually relevant study I have seen compared online and offline version of the same course, in the same year and students who all paid to study (e.g. normal students). The online people dropped out or failed much more often then offline, but it was not single digit. I cant find it now.
It's fascinating to see this happening. Both of my parents got Open University degrees here in the UK when I was a teenager. They were both teachers themselves, my father started on a Chemistry degree but switched to Computer Science, while my mother got a degree in Child Psychology.
This was in the 70s and early 80s, so remote learning is certainly viable even without the internet. They went to some seminars and tests in person, and there were summer camps and such held at university campuses during the holidays. The course is held on a schedule, you don't really work at your own pace and have to keep up, and you have an assigned tutor. Getting a degree this way could take a long time, twice as long as usual but there is also an option to do the degree full time in 3-4 years. It's not cheap though, a Computer Science course has 3 stages, corresponding to years at college, and cost about £6k per year.
The Open University still exists and seems to be going strong, and having just taken a look it seems they make extensive use of the internet. Is there anything like that in the US already? It seems to me this is a very well established and proven approach.
I think they are usually focused on practical knowledge. I think a lot of land grant state college type places have an extension school focused on training up farmers:
They couldn't prompt disruption more if they tried.
I teach at NYU also. I teach very experiential, active, project-based courses. My students, for projects in my class, get written up in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc; they speak at Harvard, TEDx; they get funded by Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt; supported by the Dalai Lama; they get promoted at their jobs without asking. Again, this is for class projects, not just later in life.
But what does the Dean I report to talk about when reviewing my syllabus? She asks "Where are the papers?" She says "It needs more academic rigor" and tells me to assign more papers to read and write. Even so, beyond their practical accomplishments, I would stake any of my students against their lecture-and-case-study-taught students in theory and impractical knowledge too.
As an adjunct, I get nearly zero resources or support. My courses use a fraction their costs -- no office, administrative support, faculty lunches, coffee, etc.
A student who told me he learned more marketing in my entrepreneurship class that was at NYU but not Stern (NYU's business school) than from his Stern marketing class said I could quote him but not by name since he didn't want to get in trouble with the school.
I'm sure my opinion won't be popular here, but I think that makes sense that they want your class to be more academic. You're teaching at a university, not a vocational school. Academia shouldn't be about being published in the NYT or Wallstreet Journal. It shouldn't be about getting raises or getting more money. It should be about discovering and sharing knowledge and it sounds like you have leaders that want and understand that.
You drew a false dichotomy. As I noted, they learn the theory better too, just not by reading theory. I don't teach a vocational class, I teach project-based learning.
Wow. I guess this kind of reckoning is overdue, but it's scary to see it happening.
I hope MOOCs play a strong role in the future of education. They're awesome and easily accessible to everyone. This could be the start of the democratization of education.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people. Universities have eagerly embraced their role as credentialist gatekeepers. Witness the rise of the cash cow master’s degree. Further, they’ve been overtly run as partnerships for the benefit of administrators rather than as the cause-oriented institutions their tax status requires.
An entire generation has been saddled with enormous debt to line the pockets of non-instructional staff. You reap what you sow.
The only shame is that it won’t hit the very top layer of exploitive institutions. But wiping out some is better than nothing.
The problem with the "handful of elites" suddenly taking over higher education is that everything about those elites is about exclusivity: you sell the fact that only the chosen few go to Harvard, Stanford, MIT, whatever. If anyone is going to take over, it'll be a public institution of some kind, where a much broader acceptance of large groups of people into the school is more a part of the DNA. Look at Georgia Tech's online masters, for example: $7k for a pretty reasonable and rigorous degree.
But even then, there isn't an online replacement to the college experience, which is in person with large groups of friends learning how to live on your own a bit in a safe, educational environment. No one wants to stay at home and take online classes and live with their parents.
My son decided to taking the next year off from school, in part to push his graduation (hopefully) out of the recession window, or the worst of it, and because it’s pretty clear that next autumn’s classes will also be online, despite the protestations of the administration.
He found a job as a developer so he’ll use the year working and (implicitly) networking which should improve things at graduation time. Internships are being cancelled or virtualized so a real job at one of those companies is more valuable at the moment. In some ways an internship in a structured internship program can be better, but not in 2020.
I like the education he’s been getting (and more importantly he does too) but the rest of the value add has been gone this semester. A big part for him has been the connection with the faculty (how did he find this job at $bigco?). No point in paying for that until things settle down.
The intro to the article is slightly different from what Galloway says. MIT sells a product that is quite valuable to a certain audience and though how that product works has evolved and will continue too, ultimately it's a boutique offering that won’t move online (some of the classes may, but really there aren’t many “big lecture hall” classes there anyway). In fact there’s only one huge lecture hall.
So I see a cohort of “high end” schools that offer low volume/high cost product (basically the Apple approach).
A few mass market winners that are essentially online only.
And some private sector “tutor” kind of places that provide a kind of third party recitation or handholding where needed.
The mass market winners may not be obvious either. The obvious candidates are the existing large high-reputation institutions like UT and UC but they may struggle institutionally to adapt. It could be a U of IL (which has already been innovating in this area), or NYU whose administration appears right now to be whistling past the graveyard but which has shown an ability over the last couple of decades to adapt significantly.
And I expect community colleges, at least where they are well run like California’s excellent system, to really adapt rapidly to “online plus a little in-person supplementation.”
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadInteresting concept, I went ahead an ordered a copy on Amazon. Not sure when it will arrive as all my USPS stuff has seen a 5-7 day delay, but looks like it's worth exploring.
I actually declined all the offers to be included in several 'rush week' inductions, I despised 'campus life' by the end of my incoming Summer Freshman year. And the notion of 'paying for my friends' was not just alien to me, but counter intuitive as I was already living and working alongside Pro-drivers, Industry leaders in Motorsports by the time I was 17 and going to Industry parties and gatherings by 19.
Later in my upper division courses I found out how critical getting a passing grade was less about what you knew, then who you knew as the Frats were running exams. Funny enough, some of those Frats would also get caught in a Drug Sting by the Federal Government that year, too.
That got me thinking, a huge part of the reason why some people fight/pay to get into the best universities is so they can get into the best companies. Isn't the university just a middle man at this point?
Then my next thoughts are mostly along the lines in what is discussed in this article.
Whether you want to get into tech, academia or government you will try to get into the best universities because they have the best alumni network, the best resources and the best name recognition.
Now of course this only applies to extremely ambitious people (I don't think being ambitious is necessarily a good thing). Plenty of people are fine working at a regional bank. Plenty of people are fine living a simple, stable life in a local government administration. Those jobs can even be attractive to ambitious people, if you're a first generation immigrant from a dirt-poor background, a stable local government job with decent pay and benefits is certainly something worth striving for. For such people a local community college will provide just the same level of knowledge and skills they'd get at a big name university.
I can't quite put my fingers on what's wrong with the article, but it rings to me as the perspective of someone who's only familiar with fancy colleges and has little knowledge (or care) for what actually goes on and who actually goes to smaller institutions.
It is party credentialing, partly middle man, but I personally learned a lot and I think going to university gave me a lot. Then again, I live in a place where I did not had to go into lifelong debt for it.
We dont know how to do good online education yet. The biggest problem seem to be that people get demotivated and drop up in much higher rates then when they go to same course in person.
But even if we would, I dont think online education will solve problem of student debt. That did not happened because it would be impossible to provide affordable education or impossible to hire people from cheaper universities. The same pressures and systems that made in person education expensive, the same system that greatly favors students from few universities for prestigious positions will make online learning have the same problems.
The average Bachelor’s graduate in the US has $38K in debt the day they graduate. If you go in state to a state school you will on average pay even less. If you don’t get an expensive graduate degree in a field with no jobs you’re not going to be swimming in debt.
The actual issue of "picked obviously bad degree with no jobs" is rather small. Most students go for practically sounding degree.
If the purpose of education is to learn something about the world, become an informed citizen, and contribute to (or at the very least, become aware of) human intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements, then no, a tech company isn’t much of a substitute.
Unfortunately these two things have been conflated, lowering the value of both. Personally I would like to see the university split into two: one half technical education based on economic needs, the other half focused on educating people. St. John’s in Annapolis / Santa Fe seems like a good model for the latter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John's_College_(Annapoli...
Conflating real education with job training and certification of intelligence and conscientiousness does not lower the value of education but it does make training and certification easier to sell by adding some of the lustre and prestige of scholarship to trade. This is to education’s benefit. Without it there would be many fewer people studying fields with no jobs or very few like the Studies, Psychology or Physics.
There will always be those whose parents can afford to spend a lot of money on a finishing school. Everyone else will need to get a job and there’s not going to be much support for subsidizing that from those whose children aren’t going to attend.
1. Providing a well-rounded education is somehow impossibly expensive, whether with modern communication technologies like the Internet or paper books. Surely the solution is to make this education cheaper, not to simply get rid of it?
2. Ignoring the fact that a democracy doesn't work if citizens aren't educated. Quoting The Great Books of the Western World:
This answer...assumes that we can leave all intellectual activity, and all political responsibility, to somebody else and live our lives as vegetable beneficiaries of the moral and intellectual virtue of other men.
The trouble with this assumption is that, whereas it was once possible, and even compulsory, for the bulk of mankind, such indulgence now, on the part of anybody, endangers the whole community. It is now necessary for everybody to try to live, as Ortega says, "at the height of his times." The democratic enterprise is imperiled if any one of us says, "I do not have to try to think for myself, or make the most of myself, or become a citizen of "the world republic of learning."
Forcing education on people does amazingly little to change their tastes.
If democracy doesn’t work if citizens aren't educated how did it work before universal primary or secondary education? The US, UK and France among others had a wide franchise long before a high school education was normative.
And education doesn’t even make informed citizens. Only 40% of the US population can name all three branches of government. Most people are ignorant of civics in all countries. You can’t make people retain information they neither use not care about but you can make their childhoods worse by wasting their time.
Forcing a simulacrum of education on the unwilling or unenthusiastic has low, low returns in knowledge.
Post Civil War, the four-year liberal arts education took on the role of finishing school for the children of the upper middle class. Vocational training was unnecessary, since they were expected to return, suitable spouse in tow, to the family business. The education, to the extent that it mattered, was to provide them with background for their role as leaders in society.
Students preparing for science, engineering, and the other grubbier majors were looked down upon, particularly the students from the lower classes on scholarship.
I don't buy the idea that being educated to be a productive person is not an education, or is somehow inferior.
I've seen too many non-STEM educated people who could really use a couple courses in statistics, what the scientific method is, how to discern gold from pyrite, what percentages mean, using data to find answers, distinguishing wealth from income, understanding exponential behavior, understanding what a chaotic system is, etc.
Besides, knowing what general relativity is just mind-bending (pun intended!).
> one half technical education based on economic needs,
The idea that scientific education is not practical is incorrect. For example, scientists contributed massively to the victory of WW2?
> Knowing what general relativity is or how to discern gold from pyrite has nothing to do with the economics of getting a good job
I used pyrite as a metaphor, it's colloquially known as fool's gold. Less delicately, learning how to distinguish shit from shinola. This is quite a valuable skill.
As for general relativity, the background needed to understand what it even is means your mind is trained, and this training is highly marketable and useful. Then being able to marvel at it is a wonderful thing, indeed.
Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either. They don't end up being able to pick samples and work with them nor understand statistical methods. They end up able to prove few conjectures.
I am not saying they should teach that, these are often not relevant to the degree.
Yes, it is. Technology is applied science. My degree is BSME - Bachelor of Science Mechanical Engineering. Freshman required classes for BSME were all science & math. Engineering classes came later, and were built on that foundation.
I don't understand where the notion that science is something else is coming from.
> Many of them don't really have statistic class that would teach practical statistic either.
Statistics is foundational to technology. For example, you cannot compute the reliability of a design without understanding statistics.
> these are often not relevant to the degree
That is just not so.
Even so, a humanities degree does not include science or statistics.
The heavier CS classes required lots of induction proofs, and the crypto classes were entirely probability oriented.
My main quibble is with the original post that supposed STEM degree holders are more rational than non-STEM degree holders, as being exposed to a subject during a semester or three in school doesn't guarantee retention after graduation if it goes unused.
That’s only possible in places where universities are businesses. Elsewhere (most of Europe for instance), it would be super easy to counter this trend: don’t give the new comers the national habilitations that make the awarded degrees recognized and thus worth something.
The future of education is not moving tests online. It’s no tests at all. The future of education is workshops.
Teachers as mentors, not lecturers and truancy officers. Exercises instead of lectures. Peers instead of tests. Projects instead of grades.
After completing a workshop, you have a project to show for it - not a score. After completing a workshop, you have an alumni network to draw on.
Workshops are self-directed. There’s a schedule to the exercises, but enough room for people to go at different paces. Students work in the open, and learn from each other. Students are encouraged to collaborate, instead of punished as cheaters. Students compete by seeing what’s possible.
Workshops are about learning to do great work, instead of learning to pass a test.
Workshops are the future of education.
COVID-19 has just accelerated this by moving schools online and laying them bare. Online there's no having lunch together, flirting, or getting dressed up. Online there's none of the things that made school more than a test. As the schools move online people see the emperor has no clothes.
Maybe there are completely dystopian schools where no communication is going on. Everything exists somewhere. But it is just not true that it is universal experience of school.
What does an employer get in your scenario? Four years of 'projects' to sift through? How do they know what a good deliverable looks like for a CS 61A class at Southeastern Louisiana State University?
No grades works great at Yale Law, when you're dealing with a group of the most talented and motivated young people on the planet. That will not work in a mass education system, where the need to make the grade is the only thing getting half of the kids out of bed in the morning.
As someone who participates in interviewing undergraduate candidates, I prefer those that have projects to talk about over those who tout their GPA. Project work correlates very well with aptitude and initiative.
Projects require deep understanding, research, trial and error, and fully integrative thinking. There's no better way to learn and grow.
I’ve run into this when interviewing or going through resumes of entry-level engineers. A lot of them will have a similar senior capstone project, so now I’m back to looking at GPA or some other signal.
“Yes yes you worked on CMU’s autonomous vehicles program. So did the other 10 candidates, but tell me what makes you truly unique? “ etc.
We might be looking for different things.
I'm just looking to hire self-driven folks that know how to program, problem solve, and communicate. I'm not looking for pedigree, elite status, or anything of that sort. In fact, I don't even care if candidates went to college. If they can demonstrate that they know what they're doing, then that's fine by me.
I predict cookie cutter projects won't be an issue. If a candidate can talk in depth about their project, the choices they made, the things they learned - that's good signal. It doesn't matter if everyone performs the same exercise, because not everyone will come away with the same experience.
I'd argue most capable people will come away with largely the same experience.
Like you, I have a bias toward projects and self-motivated individuals. What I'm saying here is that right now you filter toward that, because everybody has a good GPA, so it's not as strong of a signal. If you change the education system so that everybody has great project experience, you're going to swing back to some other metric to filter people out (like GPA/prestige of university/training program/etc.).
I don't think you can ever really escape it.
In my example, everybody has great project experience and a great GPA. So how do I decide? Well, I start looking at other things like maybe they're the captain of the volleyball team.
(speaking for university hires here at least).
And if they are not good, what it is exactly that they are missing? Then it makes sense to look for the specific thing most are missing. But it makes less sense to look for some special person without being able to define what special you look for and chasing random signals instead.
I was thinking about this point the other day. What made me question it is that everyone that goes to college went through 12 years of education that wasn't too dissimilar to that. But for whatever reason that is not considered.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
But lectures have their place. A lot of times, you need information transfer from someone who knows a lot to someone who knows little. I am in favor of video lectures with active learning components to self-test yourself.
Also, subjects like Mathematics, require a lot of practice of, perhaps, boring questions. While some practice can and should be done collaboratively, a lot of it has to be done individually. There is no substitute for that.
I know the bigger point you're making, but it has dawned on me recently that life after school is always about passing the test. Every interview that I've faced has required me to study in order to pass the test to get in.
But who knows, people also have quite a short memory, so it might be forgotten 5 years down the road.
So, with that, I think schools / majors that are aimed at "essential services" will see a rise in applicants.
However, the flip side is that there exists lower-tier institutions because there are lots of people who would not do great. If you keep a Stanford education meaning what it means today then those folks would flunk.
Look at the MOOC experiments where the percentage of people who pass is in the single digits. (There are all kinds of arguments that some people only sign up for part of the course anyway, that people can take it three times at much less cost than the traditional way once, etc., but single digits is a shock.) There are lots of people who have the skills and motivation to succeed, which is wonderful. But there are also lots of people who will fail to swim, but who are now being helped by these other places.
Could you elaborate on this? I've done a couple of MOOCs recently (Coursera in conjuction with Columbia, Princeton, etc). I could see that tens of thousands of others had enrolled. I'm curious about what the completion rate is. I personally got some value out of them. I'm wondering why they might be considered failures. In fact I'm seeing lots more courses come up.
I personally signed up to many courses I did not even intended to finish. And even where I intended to finish, it turned out too much. I could do required 6-8 of work for first few weeks, but sooner or later there is deadline in work or personal problem that you have deal with and will stop the course. It was free and I learned something without finishing it anyway.
In one case, I dropped out from final test while having all previous homework done and full credit up to that point. I just decided that learning for final test would be too much effort an stopped.
Actually relevant study I have seen compared online and offline version of the same course, in the same year and students who all paid to study (e.g. normal students). The online people dropped out or failed much more often then offline, but it was not single digit. I cant find it now.
"I think Jeff Bezos is going to offer the COVID-19 test as part of Prime membership. I think that’s where we’re headed."
Slightly off-topic but hilarious nonetheless!
This was in the 70s and early 80s, so remote learning is certainly viable even without the internet. They went to some seminars and tests in person, and there were summer camps and such held at university campuses during the holidays. The course is held on a schedule, you don't really work at your own pace and have to keep up, and you have an assigned tutor. Getting a degree this way could take a long time, twice as long as usual but there is also an option to do the degree full time in 3-4 years. It's not cheap though, a Computer Science course has 3 stages, corresponding to years at college, and cost about £6k per year.
The Open University still exists and seems to be going strong, and having just taken a look it seems they make extensive use of the internet. Is there anything like that in the US already? It seems to me this is a very well established and proven approach.
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...
I think they are usually focused on practical knowledge. I think a lot of land grant state college type places have an extension school focused on training up farmers:
https://extension.umn.edu/
https://extension.nmsu.edu/
It's not really the same as the OU.
I teach at NYU also. I teach very experiential, active, project-based courses. My students, for projects in my class, get written up in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Inc; they speak at Harvard, TEDx; they get funded by Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt; supported by the Dalai Lama; they get promoted at their jobs without asking. Again, this is for class projects, not just later in life.
But what does the Dean I report to talk about when reviewing my syllabus? She asks "Where are the papers?" She says "It needs more academic rigor" and tells me to assign more papers to read and write. Even so, beyond their practical accomplishments, I would stake any of my students against their lecture-and-case-study-taught students in theory and impractical knowledge too.
As an adjunct, I get nearly zero resources or support. My courses use a fraction their costs -- no office, administrative support, faculty lunches, coffee, etc.
A student who told me he learned more marketing in my entrepreneurship class that was at NYU but not Stern (NYU's business school) than from his Stern marketing class said I could quote him but not by name since he didn't want to get in trouble with the school.
I hope MOOCs play a strong role in the future of education. They're awesome and easily accessible to everyone. This could be the start of the democratization of education.
An entire generation has been saddled with enormous debt to line the pockets of non-instructional staff. You reap what you sow.
The only shame is that it won’t hit the very top layer of exploitive institutions. But wiping out some is better than nothing.
But even then, there isn't an online replacement to the college experience, which is in person with large groups of friends learning how to live on your own a bit in a safe, educational environment. No one wants to stay at home and take online classes and live with their parents.
https://www.gatech.edu/about/rankings
He found a job as a developer so he’ll use the year working and (implicitly) networking which should improve things at graduation time. Internships are being cancelled or virtualized so a real job at one of those companies is more valuable at the moment. In some ways an internship in a structured internship program can be better, but not in 2020.
I like the education he’s been getting (and more importantly he does too) but the rest of the value add has been gone this semester. A big part for him has been the connection with the faculty (how did he find this job at $bigco?). No point in paying for that until things settle down.
So I see a cohort of “high end” schools that offer low volume/high cost product (basically the Apple approach).
A few mass market winners that are essentially online only.
And some private sector “tutor” kind of places that provide a kind of third party recitation or handholding where needed.
The mass market winners may not be obvious either. The obvious candidates are the existing large high-reputation institutions like UT and UC but they may struggle institutionally to adapt. It could be a U of IL (which has already been innovating in this area), or NYU whose administration appears right now to be whistling past the graveyard but which has shown an ability over the last couple of decades to adapt significantly.
And I expect community colleges, at least where they are well run like California’s excellent system, to really adapt rapidly to “online plus a little in-person supplementation.”