That is exactly right. In terms of knowledge acquisition the disruption has occurred. Any motivated young person can get a world class education free of charge, without ever stepping into an ivy. But it turns out the main purpose of college is to sort people not educate them and we are only now realizing that.
Exactly. This sort of post comes up on HN at least once a month. Higher ed is a positional good.
You can watch MIT lectures, go to your local library, read blog posts, listen to podcasts, read open source. It's all free. But it won't give you that scarce resource of brand affiliation on your resume no matter how hard you try.
Whatever you learn is only one of the many components of the total package.
I think that the parent says that while you can learn almost anything from youtube, it is imposible for other people to know that you know something you learned on youtube without a test.
Funny enough, it's impossible for people to know what you've learned and retained at University without a test. They're more willing to assume that you have though.
We've already gone through an entire cycle of technology-driven higher education disruption... ever heard of an online degree? Many such online schools have made billions and lost it again by now.
Separately, the accreditation scheme upholds a high barrier to entry for disruptors. Specifically, a school must be accredited (gatekept by the US Ed Dept) for matriculating students to be eligible for government financial aid.
Is the accreditation scheme really a high barrier to entry? Several new institutions of higher education have gained accreditation in recent years. There is some paperwork and hassle involved, but we've got to have quality control to prevent scammers from taking advantage of students and taxpayers.
Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.
There is a LOT of paperwork and hassle involved. Also years of time.
It's enough of a hassle that some new institutions have found it worth their while to buy out a bankrupt school that already has accreditation rather than starting the process from scratch.
Tell me you've never looked into tried to get a school accredited without telling me. /s
Accreditation is a multi-year effort, and institutions do not necessarily receive accreditation on their first attempt.
> Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.
Disruptive technologies don't matter if the market doesn't believe your degree is worth the paper it's printed on. If your school is not accredited, students may find it difficult to transfer credits or apply to graduate programs. Additionally, students cannot use federal aid—grants or loans—for non-accredited programs.
> Is the accreditation scheme really a high barrier to entry?
Because governments make the rules about education and the curriculum. Give is slow and typ not at the tip of development. At the same time they need to get the trust and support of parents who all think they know better.
We haven't quite cracked the nuance of programming human biological systems. Anecdotally, the stay-at-home learning during the pandemic was proof we have a long ways to go.
I think most other countries don’t think there’s a problem. Because their college educations don’t cost several years of annual income, compounded at interest rates double what a car loan used to go for.
You're presenting an entirely new assumption, compared to what most people are discussing: that obtaining a bachelor's degree equivalent education can be done in significantly less than 4 years of full time study. In my experience, I don't believe that to be the case.
You're inferring that; I was referring to the income you can make in blue collar work. There are jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree equivalent education. Many young adults drop out of college (or never start) in order to take such a job.
Enrollment is tanking! It did disrupted it, just not in very measurable way! Just the fact people are discussing and questioning value of higher education on social networks, means there is so e disruption!
And YouTube is far better than bored and underpaid postdoc!
Enrollment is tanking because of the cost benefit analysis. States underfunded education for a generation so that Boomers could have lower income taxes, passed along the costs to students, and their incomes can’t possibly make up for the debt in a timely manner.
Technology could very well disrupt higher education, but not completely tear it down. Just like Airbnb disrupts hotels but Hotels still exist and are doing better now than ever.
What the future of education looks like is a lot more fractured than we can see in the past. We might think of "higher education" as just a college/university, but in reality there are already alternative forms of higher education and those will continue to be added to.
Sure MooC's seemed like scams, but some MooC's allow a huge scale of knowledge transfer. And some Cohort Based Courses as well, now. I like how Maven talks about courses as "transformational" and not just "knowledge transfer".
I'm looking forward to more and more types of higher education in the near future. Retreats, Online-Only, Hybrid, etc.
I don't think anyone ever thought they sounded like scams. At least, I didn't. They just weren't viable replacements for a traditional degree program. Which is fine, as long as you're not a VC losing your LP's money on something that anyone who has taught a few times know won't scale :)
The article's title is a rhetorical question with answer that ends in: "Motivation and self-discipline are valuable commodities, and an in-person instructor can help provide them."
Among other things. Like being able to clarify things immediately and succinctly instead of having to open yet another tab that turns into a rabbit hole distraction.
However, with anything that remotely smells like it's close to the technology field? Any clarification you might get, is probably 10 years out of date. At best.
What's actually important to learn in the technology field wouldn't matter if it were 10 years behind. We're talking about higher education-- the fundamentals, not learning the syntax of some particular framework that will no longer be used in 10 years, if 5.
I believe clarifying things immediately and succinctly may be why the author mentioned LLMs. They have the potential to provide this sort of feedback. They are obviously imperfect, but for the sort of questions that many undergraduates get stuck on (code won't compile due to a missing semicolon, etc) they are already a great asset.
Exactly. Graduating college proves a level of diligence more so than intelligence or knowledge. This is undervalued. Many of the smartest coworkers I have worked with were the worst colleagues. Intelligence and knowledge is only so valuable if hard work and interpersonal skills are absent.
I don't see how the in-person lecturer is the same as the personal trainer. The lecturer doesn't interact with you any more than a video (less, considering you can't rewind). Only the individual instruction pushes you.
Higher education has as much to do with prestige as the education itself. Getting an online education is equivalent to saying you got a diploma through the mail. Maybe it's valid or maybe it's a diploma mill. You can't be sure.
There's nothing equivalent to saying you graduated from an ivy school or such.
Online education is making a dent. Some prestigious universities have an online curriculum and are awarding diplomas that can't be distinguished from a on-campus diplomas but they are the minority by far.
The way I see it. Online education should be a game changer in 3rd world countries. Yet, it doesn't seem to be. It looks like it really does come down to motivation and your ability to push your way through the classes.
You can absolutely find video tutorials on all the hobbies and daily stuff you list, and in most communities you can find groups that will teach you informally for free or in a slightly more structured way for a nominal fee. Where formal credentials exist, they tend to be based on observed skills (like a culinary arts degree or certification as a sommelier). I'm not sure the demand for MOOCs is there for most hobbies.
There are some exceptions for hobbies with a well delimited body of knowledge (eg birdwatching)
I agree with parent
— there is no prestige issue and other contributing factors include a desire for specialized community that is absent in later years, plus reduced ability to/interest in relocating.
While you can certainly get it for free, having a cohort and a badge that perhaps could serve as a prerequisite could benefit all students and all teachers/schools.
>> I am the opposite of a handy person, and I had no idea how to deal with this myself. But I Googled. And sure enough, there are multiple YouTubers operating in the home appliance repair space with sufficient specificity and dummy-friendliness that I was able to fix it.
As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people... a mechanic is not a mechanical engineer. An electrician, is not an electrical engineer, and so on and so on.
His other anecdote of lecturer is a straw man also, as no one has done that for centuries. The idea of structured education (college) is to force you to learn ideas you would not normally learn, and have a guide to help you understand (the professor), and have those ideas organized in a pattern that aids the greater idea (e.g. taking maths: calculus, differential equations and linear algebra are not only necessary for much of engineering, but they help you to think in ways of solving problems that engineers come across often). This is one of the key problems with self-teaching, they end up not having the vast maths background to tackle complex mathematical problems, and then end up simplifying and making mistakes. In engineering, these mistakes can be deadly. In software, these mistakes can now be deadly).
The difference between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer is the latter knows the math behind it. The same for electrician and electrical engineer.
I asked the electrician wiring my house to not put the phone wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. He asked why. I said because induction will put a 60 cycle hum in the phone wires. He had no idea what that was. I fired him and did the phone wires myself.
When I had a house generator installed (long story) the electrician wanted to run the 12V battery charge line through the same conduit as the A/C. I said wouldn't inductive coupling put 120V on the battery charger? He had no idea what I was talking about. I was unable to explain it to him, and just worked with him to change the design.
Electricians know the code, the rules, can figure out the right wire size from a chart, and how to do things without getting electrocuted. Step outside of that, and they have no idea.
I think it'd be a YT engineer who thinks inductively-coupled 120V AC into an extremely low-impedance circuit over a few tens of feet would cause a problem, not an actual EE.
Similarly with 60Hz hum on phone lines in any recent decade. If the phone doesn’t have a filter, which it probably does, you can notch the hum for $20. OP is verysmart. The contractors didn’t know because it doesn’t impact anyone anymore.
I've heard of enough house phones with a hum. At the time I read everything I could find on low voltage wiring, and they recommended what I did. My phone lines are quiet. I also used cat5e for the phone lines and ethernet, and have no trouble with the 100Mb wires and gig equipment. (Cat6 wasn't available at the time.)
(The electrician tried to run cat3 or some other cheap garbage wire. He also tried to run RG59 coax, which I ripped out and replaced with RG6 quad shielded wire.)
> recent decade
This was in 1999. The wiring has survived several upgrades in digital equipment and bandwidth without change.
> which it probably does
Then it evidently is a problem, as otherwise the filter wouldn't be necessary. Besides, my phone was built in the 1950s.
I'll bite. Haven't they? Is higher education about the material, or the order it is presented in, and the contacts that you make along the way?
You're right, there are certain types of things that you can learn quite a lot about on the internet - this is especially true if there is no prerequisites. It's my favourite thing about the internet, and I'll never stop being grateful for it. I'm a self-taught hack, but I have a very intelligent/fortunate cousin that went to Berkeley (granted for business), and my interpretation is that it's a contacts/prestige thing. The information is mostly available elsewhere.
I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers.
Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor's degree, there's a minimum amount of knowledge you probably have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).
There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without "climbing the ranks" so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).
Absolutely agree. And because of this, any fantasies from tech of easily disrupting education look rather naive … almost like they’re still in the mindset of the student trying to prove their intelligence.
It seems then that the technical challenge is certification/assessment. Here, AI could play a role. If a machine can interactively and dynamically have a “conversation” with a person, that is randomised/unique and responsive to the student, all to assess how much they understand a topic, that’d probably do it. Combine it with a certain degree of oversight and random checking and provisions for review/appeal from “actual experts”, and you’d still have something that should scale pretty well beyond the university monopoly.
An additional factor is the importance of cultural/mainstream perception. There’s a lot of “hacking” or gaming of the university assessment system, especially if you contrast the reality with the lofty and important goals of education and edification. I’d be interested to know how many, having gone through the system, really put that much faith in the quality of the “certificate”. I’ve certainly heard stories of some people/institutions wishing to also look at high school or secondary college results because they’re less likely to be “gamed” (though I have no idea how common at all this is).
Assessment is a minor technical challenge, but finding people to assess might be a bigger challenge. Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. Everything is speculation unless that number can be nailed down.
A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of the jobs that are being hired for. An example is the automation of engineering calculations by high level software such as CAD.
I've gone through the system. I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
> Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own.
I'm not sure solitary self-learning is the only type of learning consistent with a disrupting higher education. If technology is to drive change here, I'd argue that a plurality of competing education/learning resources or services from which an individual can cater their choices to their own needs is what would be aimed for (or at least likely).
> I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
I agree. However, to my point about cultural perception, which I believe plays a large role in the state of higher education, what happens when higher education if universally seen as mostly "weeding"? Are the costs, inconveniences, cultural hegemonies/hangups/snobberies desirable and worth it?
The "weeder" course isn't intended to be symbolic. It tends to be a course that can only be offered after the students have gotten through the basic math cycle, i.e., 3rd year, and is heavily mathematical / theory oriented. I taught it once as an adjunct -- Electrodynamics in the EE department.
Teachers are fully aware that a "weeder" course is a problem, and make a sincere effort to get as many students through as possible. But nonetheless it results in a lot of attrition.
> No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).
State schools have a really unique potential here. There are many now that will confer an on-campus bachelors diploma for 100% remote degrees. The coursework is equally rigorous, administered by a single professor with small class sizes, and the exams are proctored. Any attempt at cheating can be easily snuffed out in this environment. MOOCs are a dead end in terms of providing this. But a state school is a respectable degree and I really hope they’ll extend this to STEM subjects soon.
> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors.
IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order:
1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields.
2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type.
3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.)
Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well.
Most institutions provide very little signalling value.
Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment.
And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system.
American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs".
edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)
> Most institutions provide very little signalling value.
Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.
1. if you aren't Stanford, trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to gain back once lost. One bad placement raises alarms and more than one poisons the well for an entire degree program. There aren't many regional employers per degree program, and national/global employers are a "reach job" for most students. This is something that non-elite institutions know in a visceral and painful way. They are so careful with the few regionally well-regarded degree programs they manage to build. The folly of VC world was obvious to those faculty, and their students (such as me), from the start.
2. if you aren't Stanford, most of your students probably really do need a couple years (at least) of in-person instruction before they are ready for the labor force. Again, anyone who has taught at one of these institutions just knows! Once every 10 years you get the type who didn't really need the degree to learn the material, and you do your best to elevate them past the institution's typical bar for outcomes. But the other 9 years, 100% of students require a lot of real work before they are ready.
In other words, most institutions cannot afford to signal without that signal being extremely accurate. AND they don't have the type of students who don't really need the education. So they educate students and then signal the value of hose students not just through grades but also especially through things like referrals, letters, and so on. But, again, I wouldn't expect a Stanford or UIUC or Michigan grad to understand this world.
You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. The material is worthless to them. I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.
> You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees.
Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills.
> I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.
This simply isn't true for most students in most regional economies. No one is paying a premium for a piece of paper anymore.
It sounds like you are a math teacher, so I suspect your experience is because you are speaking to employers who are looking to hire math students. In that case I agree, calculus is important. For students outside of STEM it’s a different story in my experience.
I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module.
I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations.
I speak with all types of employers for all types of students, in my capacity as a member of those committees/boards. Ranging from high school dropouts finishing their high school diploma later in life to masters students. My comments here are mostly about traditional undergraduate students, though.
It has long been a tradition of Wall Street to hire Ivy grads with name-your-social-studies major (History, Government, English, Philosophy) into investment banking analyst roles. These kids then proceed to live in Excel and Powerpoint for 2+ years. They get hired for the reasons that the parent commenter stated. It's different out here in the tech/startup world - you truly need the skillset beforehand to step into the role, but I imagine there are plenty of other industries similar to Wall St where they just want someone young and smart who they can train to do the job. The core curriculum gets thrown out the window - it's about time management, self motivation to be successful, smart enough to deal with ambiguity, etc.
Yes, I understand. I think the last ten years of Ed Tech startups are people from that class losing huge amounts of LP money because they don't understand that this is not how the other 99% of higher education works.
Thanks for adding your perspective. I’ve definitely always thought of this problem in terms of what you call the “national/global employers” and I’ve never really considered it in terms of non-elite colleges targeting local job markets.
I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.
> My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.
A few thoughts follow.
With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience.
First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of places, but in extremely different role types. I've mostly only been in "normal" roles at low-prestige firms, but I've only been in either pure R&D groups or "elite" product groups at high-prestige firms. So, for me, FAANG-style work looks incredibly different and is completely inaccessible to the average student from my alma mater at basically any point in their career, without substantial additional education. A lot of this personal anecdote is due to comparing my career before and after my (more elite-signalling) PhD. So, it's hard for me to know.
Now, in terms of mentoring, I can say some things.
First, the higher paying firms consistently get our best and brightest students. These students are the ones who only pass through our type of institution once every 5-10 years. Those employees are way more versatile, productive, disciplined, and frankly just intelligent. Are they doing to same work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But FAANG/high finance/et al. does seem to be choosing the absolute cream of the crop. At least from us. They are definitely buying more versatility and higher general intelligence if nothing else. Again, FROM US, a small non-elite school. I know institutional bias means that this may not be true in general.
Second, my impression is that a lot of our students would have a really hard time simply onboarding to tooling at the two FAANGs I know the most about. Think "Java programmer who uses IntelliJ and drops a JAR onto a single VM. Knows about but still isn't very comfortable with things like command lines or version control. Relies on senior engineers for anything more complicated than developing on one or two branches with rare merges and deployment to a single VM". That's a bit of an exaggeration but not far off, so you can see how landing at Google or Facebook might be a painful way for those students to start their career.
FWIW, I think the department is very pragmatics-focused. We aren't failing to teach git because we're too busy teaching automata theory, for example. We don't even teach the latter. So, very focused on software development career prep. But the quality of student and dedication to craft just isn't there. Getting students into internships gives a huge improvement but is still an uphill battle for us. Improving internship placement is therefore a major focus of the alumni's strategic efforts over the next five years. I suspect that with a couple years of full-time work and good mentorship all of our students would be ready for a normal SWE role at FAANG, but straight out of undergrad would fail at even the basics of a FAANG software job.
You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstractions used by our chosen internal framework were not straightforward and it took some serious mental effort to wrap my head around everything, despite being familiar with Rails and Spring and the like. Of course once I figured out the tools I was able to create massively scaled stuff much more productively than I could with any open-source tooling. But if I was just a little less smart I might have never figured it out at all.
Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies. But presumably if you stick enough smart people together someone will eventually invent something novel and profitable, even if the median employee never does.
> Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies.
Given the cost of every minute of downtime at FAANG scale, the ability to rescue a production system a few hours faster than your competition is worth embarrassing multiples of your wage premium against non-FAANG engineers.
Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.
However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn.
Making money by educating people is a bad business. It is expensive and time consuming and the more you try to cut expenses the worse the education gets. Non-profit is the right model for it.
If you really want to make money off the back of education build something useful for colleges and universities. They are big complex organizations with specialized needs where off the shelf solutions don’t cut it and there are enough of them to make a nice business out of if you come up with a solution that is dramatically better than what is out there. A lot of the technology solutions that are used barely work but there are few options.
I mostly agree. The one place I split with you -- and hard -- is that I view the institutions in my life as charities. I am admittedly blessed in that all save one (my PhD school) really is basically a well-run charity.
The only one that isn't public and sparten is not rich amd not elite. All are way more lean than most businesses (<10% of staff are non-teaching, and almost all of those are feeding students or keeping buildings standing/clean/powered... I can name every employee on the Administration floor off the top of my head).
If you really want to make money off the back of education... don't. Build your thing and give it away at cost.
But I do understand why someone who only spent time in places like my PhD school would feel differently and view these places as just another industry. I just don't think they are ready for the fact that 90+% of the market competition is way more lean, way more low-profit, and way more human-capital-intensive than any VC is interested in.
I think higher education institutions should be non-profit. I do think there are a lot of financial pressures on most small-medium non-public schools that make them operate in a more business oriented fashion and they must do so to stay open.
When I talk about making money I am talking about system utilized by colleges like enrollment CRMs, grading software etc. In most cases the only way those get made and are supported is through for-profit businesses.
Outside US and a few other countries with private universities, they actually are mostly state sponsored and everyone that meets the grades gets in (of course as per seat availability per year), instead of having to mortage the house.
In some countries private universities even get a bad reputation, with exception of a few renowed ones, as their graduates are seen by the employers as having bought their degree, even if they battled throught it as everyone else, e.g. in Portugal.
> Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.
A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions.
Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to.
A bachelor's is an extension of high school. You show you can assimilate knowledge at a professional level.
A masters shows you can do extensive research of existing knowledge in a narrow field.
A doctorate shows you can perform novel research and add knowledge to a field.
...but perhaps that is not really applicable to all fields of study. In any case, "glorified dropout" is imho too harsh, as it implies a failure. For most people, the economic tradeoff in getting a masters degree or higher (both in terms of tuition and time lost not working) simply makes it a bad choice.
I was describing the old system in Finland, which was similar to many countries in the Continental Europe.
Master's degree was the primary undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degree existed on paper, but it wasn't recognized in the society. People often got their bachelor's and master's on the same day.
At some point, politicians started promoting bachelor's degrees to get people graduate faster. The academia accepted that, but the job market didn't, at least not initially. Because people were not familiar with bachelor's degrees, they often didn't consider them serious degrees. Some people knew them but took them as a negative sign. The idea was that if a university degree is a sign that you can achieve something, leaving the university after bachelor's is sign that you failed at that.
I left Finland a long time ago, and I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.
My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degrees.
A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional degree. Law/medical degrees may be graduate or undergraduate degrees. A bachelor's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a master's degree, and a master's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a doctorate. There may be intermediate degrees between a bachelor's and a master's and between a master's and a doctorate. Not all research doctorates are PhDs. An MD is not necessarily a doctorate, and the doctorate in medicine could be an MD, a PhD, or something else. Having a PhD in medicine may imply that you are not an MD.
Whatever your experiences from the academia may be, the academia is not universally like that.
> My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degree
No. Read again what you wrote. It wasn't a qualified statement about different values in different places, ie "in this culture X is more like Y" it was a general claim with no background:
"A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree"
As an aside, what if the “administrative apparatus” is as important as the academics? In SaaS companies, are sys admins and security engineers less important than the product developers? How important are the networking staff or the staff that handle backups? In higher ed, the administrative apparatus includes a myriad of critical functions and basic infrastructure such as advising, career services, mental health counseling, the registrar (course registration, transcripts), food services, the dormitories, building maintenance, cleaning services, IT, campus police, and on and on. Large universities are basically small cities.
> Most institutions provide very little signaling value.
I don't think this is true.
Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education.
While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offered certificate of completion for $50-$300 per course. These kinds of programs fizzled because even if students did learn the material the certificates did not sufficiently signal to employers that the student had learned it. A friend of mine from one of these universities did an internal study showing that of those students who completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree almost none found employment in their field. This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.
On a more conciliatory note; I generally agree VC ed-tech has been a boondoggle for similar reasons - a combination of misunderstanding education and realizing that no other part of education is monetizable enough to produce the kind of returns VCs want (barring certain extra-ordinary tech innovations that have not been forthcoming e.g. strong AI)
> This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.
To me, it's not at all surprising that "got the [equivalent of a] degree but didn't have the normal level of interaction with faculty" results in a vastly different outcome.
You're assuming that the credential itself is the signal. For regional economies in the US who hire primarily from regional universities, the credential often isn't the primary signal. They'll ask for a reference and actually talk with a faculty member listed.
Colleges and especially individual faculty have ties to major regional employers. Those employers understand that output is more variable (in large part because input in more variable). Other employers don't know anything about the institution at all and are likely to bin the app for any role that isn't eg low-pay or pure commission.
So the institution maintains relationships with alumni and others making hiring decisions at their "strategic" new grad employers, mostly regional small and medium sized companies. Frank assessments from trusted faculty play an important role in securing first placements. This is particularly true for (low-)paid internships, which are often the primary feeder for new grad positions.
If I know that the institution has mixed output and my phone call to the professor listed as a reference is basically "they completed some online modules but we didn't interact much", then I will probably pass.
Doesn't that depend on the field of study? There is a fairly straightforward path for a motivated student to self-study to the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. But how would that work in, let's say, history? I took a fair number of history courses as electives and if I had just read books and watched videos I think I would have come away with a really skewed and incomplete education. Class discussions with instructors and peers gave me a much better perspective on many topics.
It may be useful to expand proctoring centers, and provide online universities where many exams are taken in-person and a lot of the grade is determined by assignments that can't easily be faked/cheated (e.g. randomly-generated questions, projects)
Universities have pre-existing weight and "old money" recognition, but there's nothing inherently more "reliable" about them than online. A lot of people cheat in college, a lot of people take courses with inflated grades or courses which teach old concepts, and then have to learn everything again when they get their first job. It's absolutely true that if someone has a degree from a reputable college they very likely know their field, but if someone has an degree from a "reputable" online college then they also very likely know their field.
It's not fair that in order to prove "acquired knowledge" you need to pay over $10K per semester and travel to an expensive college. It would be nice if we start to see people from online universities succeed in the workforce and build great things, then online degrees would likely be accepted more.
Random does not prevent cheating. Cheating happens because students know the problem style ahead of time. It’s like doing leet code, vs knowing the question and then redoing it with a slightly different question
Being prepared for the problem style ahead of time isn't cheating, it's just studying.
If your claim is that this style of studying isn't preparing students for the real world where the problems cannot be easily predicted then I definitely agree. But cramming isn't cheating, students are just trying to succeed within the system.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is…
With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture.
You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc.
Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem.
I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
> I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough.
Is that how you meant it?
I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
How often does an economist ever receive feedback on their theories? AFAICT, only a handful of people make economic decisions at the scale of economic theory.
I am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.
Fair enough. I suppose using the dismal science as the organizing anecdote in this particular conversation is a point I shouldn't cede :) Maybe something like accounting, corporate finance, or tax law makes for a more interesting conversation.
But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting?
The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.
> With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth
I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post.
Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.
Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors.
I misread what you wrote here. I thought your point was that the value of education was merely as a signal for knowledge rather than in the acquisition of knowledge. Rereading your post I see what you were getting at is the capturable value from an ed tech/ed business perspective. Sorry about the misreading.
In social science and humanities, I agree with you that self studying is an uphill battle. You'll just sound naive unless (1) you've made a herculean effort in studying, and (2) you've thought very critically on your own about how you will assimilate and where you will fit into the existing space of thought. There are no definitively correct opinions in these fields but plenty of influential people have theories. My experience is that it's all about how you convince others to join your "team", whether what you say is appropriate and within the Overton window, whose "side" are you on, etc. In some sense the thing that is "taught" is how to argue, what's acceptable to think, and who is on whose side or not. And the punishment for saying the "wrong" thing is more severe than in mathematized fields.
Textbooks and/or (current) edtech are not going to be effective there.
But in hard scientific topics (mathematics, algorithms, engineering) there are facts and ideas that are taught, and it's equally easy or hard to learn from prose as it is from listening. In my experience you can be very effective self-studying as long as you already have basic background about the field and what's the point. I skipped 2-3 years of math in school by simply reading the textbook over the summer, doing the exercises, and just asking to skip to the next class. You do this a few times and then you realize that in-person classes are also just them reading the textbook to you. I don't regret it whatsoever.
I'd argue the difference is how mathematized a field is, probably along the same lines as SMBC:
I’ve taught mathematics for over 20 years in higher education and I strongly disagree with your view on the relative ease of learning math on one’s own. Let’s take a simple example. Here’s the distributive property for rings:
a(b + c) = ab + ac
It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following:
3(x + 2) = 3x + 6
It’s much harder to convince someone that
3x + 6 = 3(x + 2)
It’s hard to convince someone that factoring is just using the distributive property reading right to left instead of left to right. It’s much harder to convince them of this just from reading it in a book. The nuance will be lost. They need examples that one goes over in a classroom to see this and a book can’t contain enough examples without being too many pages or without boring the reader with what appears to them to be minutia. They can’t grasp the nuance from reading. They grasp it from doing problems and being guided on the problems at the time they do them.
Books and videos can not replace a teacher. Your experience is not the norm and you should not use it as a guide for what is realistically possible for most people.
I agree with you except for the very last point, that "students need to be guided on problems at the time they do them". I think this issue is fundamental to the tradeoffs of self studying that I've experienced. I want to point out: the guide doesn't necessarily have to be a human. And textbooks accomplish this by giving examples that walk through how to solve problems similar to the exercises. Unfortunately this is a useful secret about textbook and problem design that is not common knowledge to students. (I.e., the principle of charity, principle of relevance, Chekhov's gun, etc.)
I agree with the point of your example, but maybe not the choice of example.
For your example, Gallian (which imo is the standard intro algebra book) includes this property in the definition of a ring: "Property 6. a(b + c) = ab + ac and (b + c)a = ba + bc". (Probably in order to disclaim the confusion you're talking about.) Then he goes on to derive 6-7 other properties of groups that will (of course) be useful in the exercises.
I definitely found it's really important when self-studying to pick the right textbook. Definitely you have to be an experienced educator to write a good book that anticipates most of these things. But I agree that it's impossible for any textbook to anticipate every place someone reading it might get stuck. Let's say for a given student it happens 5-6 times in a really high quality textbook like Gallian or Rudin PoMA. They have 3 options (1) ask on mathematics.stackexchange.com and probably get an answer because it's a great community, (2) try to figure it out themselves, or (3) pay $600 and invest 3h/wk to take an algebra class that might cover the first 1/2 of the textbook in 4 months.
I think where we disagree is what are the constraints of the tradeoff between attending a class vs. reading the book. My experience has been that, if the subject is interesting enough, reading a good quality textbook is cheaper and 2-3x faster than taking a course, but at certain points it can be much more challenging. I think where it depends on which student is how much more challenging, i.e., will they be able to dig themselves out of those holes in a few minutes or a few hours. I was personally in the middle of these two extremes, but I still thought it was worth it to self study after taking 3-4 classes in the math department, then I skipped a bunch (7 semesters) of analysis/algebra/topology and came back and took 2-3 grad courses, where I didn't really understand the main goal of the subjects until I took the classes. And then I went into CS industry and never used any of it again. But I don't regret the experience; it was legitimately interesting to learn about math.
I think you have to be legitimately interested in a subject to self study it successfully. But that's true about studying serious math in general though: you have to be unrelentingly into it, or else you're just really misguided and shouldn't be there, given the high competition, poor odds for any future in math, and no practical use for any of the theory.
That's my experience with it and why I made the argument that I made.
My example was geared toward those people learning beginning algebra in 9th grade or so or the great many students who place into pre college level math during their first semester of undergrad. I used the word “ring” because as I was writing my comment I didn’t want any readers to think my example only applied to integers, or rationals, or reals. So I said “ring” trying to capture a nuance that very few people would appreciate.
I contend you are an outlier in the extreme. I think very few people can read a math book and get anything out of it unless they have had training. For one thing, in lower level math we lie to students all the time. We just can’t be honest about things because students at that level can’t appreciate the insane number of nuances. For example, ask a first year calculus student what “dx” means and their answer will be complete nonsense but they don’t know that. We can’t tell students what “dx” really is because it is quite beyond their level of understanding.
Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate your perspective.
I think your quote from Gallian doesn't address syzarian's example, actually.
The two properties you quoted are about the fact the distributivity works whether you're multiplying on the left or on the right. That's one possible left-right confusion, but I would argue most weak students believe it holds even when it doesn't, so in a sense they're too permissive in their reasoning.
However, syzarian's example is about a different left-right confusion: whether you can read an equality both forwards and backwards. I've seen this confusion in students: they will readily believe that you can distribute a factor over a sum (going forward), but be very skeptical about the act of factoring out (going backward), even though it's justified by the same equation. In this case, the students aren't permissive enough in their reasoning.
This is the kind of misconception (that equality has a "direction") that's much easier to suss out with an in-person interaction, whether it's with a teacher or other students.
Oh. Wow, you are right. I honestly just read the definition in Gallian wrong, and then, even as I was typing it, I swear I thought it said "ba + bc = b(a + c)". What a crazy experience of confirmation bias by me.
I obviously agree that a human is extremely effective at explaining that "equals" is symmetric and not the same as "implies". I'm just arguing that the task also can be done in prose to similar, if inferior, effect.
I did agree however that because math has so many gotchas like this, then no textbook will ever disclaim all potential sources of confusion like the example by GGP. And so our discussion boils down to the tradeoff between the price and time investment of taking a class vs. the increased difficulty of self-studying. And how different people assign value differently to each side of the tradeoff, which I claim is the root of our disagreement.
this has been doing rounds on twitter how people do not have grasp of basic maths and it points out a good argument for people who have been taught "good basics"... like i recently asked a doctor who says they are bad at maths and they just blurted out 3. i asked why and they responded, "uh.... bodmas?"
its such a small thing really, like in your primary and secondary education, of all the classes you attend, this is just a tiny tiny topic that must've been taught but because you were taught its importance and use it as a building block early on, it just feels like second nature.
like the tables of 2-9. pretty hard for kids to remember but once they do and they are taught to HOW to use it, it really helps them
I think this is an apples to oranges comparison. You get taught pemdas or bomdas early on and then use it hundreds of times throughout school and the rest of your life. The value of learning it is clear.
Whereas ring theory is very much specific to algebra and you're not going to use it programming, doing chemistry, or whatever else outside math. Finding motivation to learn pure math is a bit harder.
GP's example illustrates a good point. I agree with their point.
I think that OP's fundamental error is talking about school vs university. When I started my bachelor's studies in math the professor covered 3 years of high-school math in the first 2-3 weeks of the first semester.
Up to that point I too thought I could just learn by reading the textbook. University (assuming a good one, mine wasn't world famous but has a good reputation nationally & in Europe) level maths is completely different level than high school level math, and having access to the professors makes a big difference (although I was often the only student coming by at their office hours if it wasn't before a test, so I guess not everyone agrees with that).
If you're talking about me (GP not OP); when I said "school" I meant during my undergrad at a university. I'm claiming that I skipped 2-3 years of math at university by self studying, specifically 2 years of analysis, 1 year of topology, and some algebra.
You can absolutely do this for university math using textbooks if you're motivated enough. Which I was.
Sorry for the colloquialism. "School" means university in the U.S. tech industry, but apparently not in Europe.
Edit: Reply to child comment before I log off. Haha I agree. The really valuable things I learned from math professors had nothing to do with the curriculum though. It was more like stories about all the people they saw going crazy trying to get tenure, ultimately failing and then seeking revenge against those who denied them; how they all go to conferences sometimes and drink very heavily afterwards in the nearest bar; and just little colloquialisms. Math academia was a really interesting subculture of very interesting people.
No worries! I think for undergraduate studies I’m sure you can. Although motivation levels of “motivated enough” have to be pretty high!
My experience was that pretty quickly professors (and TAs) provided insight and guidance I couldn’t (or at least didn’t) get from just reading the textbook. But also that this increases the further you go in your education- in a 200 student auditorium class for linear algebra or calculus the professor isn’t going to be giving you any individual attention but in my school even by the 3rd-4th semester classes were already often small (15-20 students) and we had actual conversations with the professors about the material (and beyond).
I feel that this comment misunderstands both hard sciences as well as social sciences and humanities. My wife is a historian. The idea that the way to succeed in history is to just make various influential people like you since there is no actual "correct opinion" is just rank bullshit.
And the idea that in, say, computer science, that there is precisely one correct approach to a given problem is also completely bogus once you've moved beyond trivial questions.
It's the same as you can get more fit by exercising and eating right on your own. All the material resources you need are there, but you need to add some personal behaviour to do it.
>>Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth.
Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough.
My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term.
Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.
What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?
in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.
is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
> What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?
The best predictor of being able to apply knowledge is better mastery of that knowledge and the context in which you are applying it, e.g. to be a creative mathematician you must know some things relating to the problems you're solving deeply.
> is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful
Most companies use the following signals
1. A track record of success
2. Intelligence
3. Consentiousness - the willingness to do required work even if you don't want to
4. Stress tolerance
This is somewhat unsatisfying. One would hope you'd also try to detect attitudes or ideologies that blind you to entire solution spaces or being a massive jerk and alienating people around you.
> What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?
You survived the 3-5 year ordeal and got your BSc or MSc, this implies you can apply some knowledge in some way.
> in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.
The signal universities provide is not perfect, or even very strongly correlated with anyone's ability to excel in a specific domain. But it is somewhat positively correlated, which means using it as employment filter will weed out more bad than good candidates, which makes hiring cheaper and less risky. In other words: however bad the correlation is, it's already good enough to be useful.
> is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful?
I worry this is an anti-inductive problem: i.e. if you can measure the right factors and predict if a person will be successful accurately enough, you can make people successful (look at it as closed-loop control problem) - but it's most likely cheaper to just make them seem successful instead. The measure becomes a target, and so eventually will cease to become a good measure.
(In a sense, BSc and MSc titles are suffering from just that. They're no longer anywhere as strong a signal than they were 50 years ago.)
> And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
Unfortunately, the two goals - teaching for economic prospects, and educating for a rich and successful life in a more general sense - are at odds with each other.
> It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this
I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this.
Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test.
So this is your class population; now weed them out.
Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test.
Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them.
You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try.
Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.
Look at this from the perspective of the participants of your test: you're asking them to play in a lottery, whose odds are one to million, and the price of admission is years of long, hard work.
No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk.
But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.
It has? You are describing every centralised college admissions exam, from the Chinese NCEE ("gaokao") to the Indian JEE-A or the French concours for admission to the better universities...
This base signaling of “minimal viable education” should really lead toward an assessment creation tool that would capture (and then reduce the necessity of) - the massive redundant labor of assessment content creation by educators. A significant portion of the content taught has been assessed a million different times. Much of that assessment content is locked up on static documents making reuse laborious. So - solve the educator’s pain point by allowing me to create an appropriately tailored set of assessment items instantly, curate items rapidly, and proctor the assessment immediately. US states spend something like 1-2 billion/yr on standardized testing. If(!) the veracity of the assessments can be established, move onto chopping the legs of the college board in an innovator’s dilemma situation by providing a lower cost ‘minimal viable education’ credential. Try to reduce the cost and necessity of low value higher education by reducing the perceived value of their credentialing abilities.
>It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks
That is not the point of a liberal higher education, though.
Historically (for much longer than a century) people were tutored k-12 in their own homes, with their families and neighbors, and not in these government-run public schools. You could learn whatever you wanted from books at home, and a governess and key instructors.
Still, you were sent off to college at a certain age, to be finished as either a man or a woman at a place like Harvard or a women’s college. The purpose was not principally to teach you math or anthropology that you couldn’t otherwise learn yourself (though you would learn some math and anthropology). There was another purpose
If your family was wealthy enough for you to be economically inactive as a youth, and to pay for said governess and instructors.
Higher education was for the rich, too. As you said, a different purpose, mostly social (definitely social for the wealthy young women).
All those little, often church-supported, colleges and land-grant state universities and teachers' colleges that sprang up all over the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That was a revolution: higher education for the non-rich, and mostly for practical purposes.
My coworkers were talking about this at lunch the other day. An experienced tech guy asked all the employees there what they thought about whether a 4-year degree should be a requirement for tech jobs. All the new grads of course shit on their educations. A couple more senior people were of course more hesitant.
But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0.
I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was
(1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way,
(2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable
and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and
(3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech.
I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.
I would say 90%. I would contend the main problem is we really don't believe in education as a society.
Most people don't even believe that becoming more educated makes you "smarter". "Smart" is this CPU clock speed you naturally have and then "education" is running the cpu through various benchmarks.
School is just standardization of the benchmarks so it can't be cheap and freely available. We don't want everyone to join the guild. As a society we want joining the guild to be as prohibitively expensive as possible while pretending we wish the guild could be open and free. All a racket and bullshit for 99% of the population.
> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors.
Importantly, though, the topic here is higher education, not education. Higher education refers to a type of business. And the business of higher education isn't in the business of education at all, but rather in the business of socialization. The value proposition is exposure to other, generally like-minded, people in which to engage with and form bonds with, particularly with respect to mating.
While at some level something like this very forum could disrupt that there is something missing. Tech hasn't solved for the "human touch" and until then there will be value in stepping out into the real world. And so long as there is value in existing in the real world, people will pay for that.
Definitely. Going to university is also a very gentle way to leave home and grow up - you gradually learn to do things like budget, cook, find accommodation and so on while there is still support around you and have vacations when you can go home to your parents.
Because technology was never the problem. All it did was morph some things in to different shapes with similar functions and features, and that doesn't actually change anything.
Education in itself doesn't need disrupting. If anything, it needs stability.
> And a sort of naive read on the situation would be to say that if we look at the people who are really strong, they show that inefficient, non-scalable personal training has been disrupted by whatever hobbyist forums or other internet resources they rely on.
I think this absolutely misses the mark on the two most critical factors. Number 1: *exposure to and interaction with a community of peers engaged in personal improvement in the same manner*
I can read Aristotle and Mills and Kant on my own in my living room; but this is not the same as being part of a book club (or a college course) reading these texts and discussing them. Finding positions, explaining them to your peers, perhaps defending those viewpoints, listening to others do the same, challenging them on their viewpoints, etc. These are examples of a secondary layer of context and understanding of a subject that is inherently not replicable in isolated learning.
I have a friend who deadlifts over 750 lbs. Do you think he goes to Planet Fitness and hops on the elliptical for 20 minutes and then goes home? No. He goes to a gym filled with similarly powerful, driven lifters. He discusses training loads, regimens, diet, etc. with his peers. The knowledge transfer between skilled practitioners is critical to master of a craft past a certain point. Sure, almost anyone who lifts for 3 years with even moderate dedication can eventually break 3 plates. But 5 plates? 6? 7? 8?! No, that requires something more: a petri dish for cultivating improvement; a community of similarly motivated individuals.
Number 2: A subject matter expert who can react and interact with you and your peers. Having a SME to highlight what is critical, to deprioritize what is 'cruft', to dispel or correct misunderstandings/misconceptions, to push the depth of the learning/training to a more advanced level; this is a massive advantage that in-person education has over impersonal, technologically-distributed courses.
Sure, some things are easily teachabale over YouTube. One of my favorite examples: Simple mechanical work. I've used YouTube multiple times to supplement my existing knowledge & owner's manual. It's helped me flush brake lines, install oil coolers, replace a water pump, and align headlights. Work like this, that is to say, work that doesn't require a high level of expertise, is easily transferable via YouTube. This is akin to taking notes during a lecture. More complicated work, like... say, dropping an engine, replacing the crankshaft, and remounting the engine is a task that requires a higher skill/knowledge base to perform correctly. I would not trust someone to do that with purely internet-based instruction.
Lastly, I would like to say that I believe scale necessarily diminishes the quality of what is being produced. You cannot teach 4000 students online as well as you can teach 400 in person; and likewise a 400 person lecture is necessarily a lower-quality educational product than a 40 person lecture & follow up socratic seminar.
From what I see technology has definitely disrupted higher education. Textbooks, worksheets, and report cards are being replaced by Khan Academy, MyLab, Canvas. Teachers are doing less teaching and delegating more tasks to these services: assigning online modules, quizzes, and resources to help students (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as some of these online modules are really good).
I predict that very soon we will have AI tutors like ChatGPT, and then entire courses will be automated in technology. We already have "100% tech" online schools with one teacher per 100+ students or no teachers at all; but with AI tutors, I expect these schools will become much more effective, much more popular, and ultimately much more prevalent. I don't believe that the traditional school system will be replaced or that any public schools will become online-only: in-person learning is still necessary for many students, as are factors like free lunch and mandatory socialization, and AI will never solve those issues. But I do believe that fully-online learning, which is already rapidly growing, will start to grow even more rapidly.
And this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Frankly, many people's public education system sucks because of lack of resources, and I don't see any alternative way that it can improve, because of lack of resources. For the students, a good AI tutor can be much more helpful than a teacher (and much more patient). For the teachers, it may be harder to get a "traditional" general-elective teaching job, but maybe instead they can teach small focus groups in special classes, where the teaching is much more fun and interesting, but also harder to automate. The state of education in modern society is awful and this has serious consequences (see: recent elections); a low-cost, effective teaching solution would be a huge benefit to global society.
If AI tutors are not designed and implemented in a way that is inclusive and respectful of diverse learning styles and needs, they may perpetuate or even exacerbate existing inequalities and discrimination.
Learning styles are a pedagogical myth and there is no evidence that they exist or that catering learning to and individual learning style improves said learning.
I have discovered that ChatGPT is useless for advanced learning, at least at its present state of development. It's often just wrong, often incomplete - not really any more reliable than just seaching Wikipedia for answers to questions.
Universities have been around for thousands of years. Good universities offer a unique combination of factors - people of the same age group, professors and a distinct atmosphere that encourages learning.
How are you going to teach science and engineering courses where you need access to labs?
And, university is where you get a chance to meet people from diverse fields and backgrounds, get exposure to challenging points of view and build life long bonds.
It's another thing to work remotely as an adult, where there are competing demands on your time, but I would never wish online learning on a young adult!
> Universities have been around for thousands of years.
Actually, most historians tend to trace the oldest university back to the late 1100s (or maybe up to a hundred years older), with the University of Bologna being considered the first university. This is especially true if you consider university to be less "place of learning" and more an intentional community of students and their instructors.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadYou can watch MIT lectures, go to your local library, read blog posts, listen to podcasts, read open source. It's all free. But it won't give you that scarce resource of brand affiliation on your resume no matter how hard you try.
Whatever you learn is only one of the many components of the total package.
Separately, the accreditation scheme upholds a high barrier to entry for disruptors. Specifically, a school must be accredited (gatekept by the US Ed Dept) for matriculating students to be eligible for government financial aid.
Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.
There is a LOT of paperwork and hassle involved. Also years of time.
It's enough of a hassle that some new institutions have found it worth their while to buy out a bankrupt school that already has accreditation rather than starting the process from scratch.
Tell me you've never looked into tried to get a school accredited without telling me. /s
Accreditation is a multi-year effort, and institutions do not necessarily receive accreditation on their first attempt.
> Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.
Disruptive technologies don't matter if the market doesn't believe your degree is worth the paper it's printed on. If your school is not accredited, students may find it difficult to transfer credits or apply to graduate programs. Additionally, students cannot use federal aid—grants or loans—for non-accredited programs.
> Is the accreditation scheme really a high barrier to entry?
Yes. Yes, it is.
Make School failed to get accreditation. I doubt Make School is worse than the worst accredited university.
And YouTube is far better than bored and underpaid postdoc!
What the future of education looks like is a lot more fractured than we can see in the past. We might think of "higher education" as just a college/university, but in reality there are already alternative forms of higher education and those will continue to be added to.
Sure MooC's seemed like scams, but some MooC's allow a huge scale of knowledge transfer. And some Cohort Based Courses as well, now. I like how Maven talks about courses as "transformational" and not just "knowledge transfer".
I'm looking forward to more and more types of higher education in the near future. Retreats, Online-Only, Hybrid, etc.
However, with anything that remotely smells like it's close to the technology field? Any clarification you might get, is probably 10 years out of date. At best.
There's nothing equivalent to saying you graduated from an ivy school or such.
Online education is making a dent. Some prestigious universities have an online curriculum and are awarding diplomas that can't be distinguished from a on-campus diplomas but they are the minority by far.
The way I see it. Online education should be a game changer in 3rd world countries. Yet, it doesn't seem to be. It looks like it really does come down to motivation and your ability to push your way through the classes.
Would be interesting to see MOOCs on daily stuff: cooking, gardening, cleaning & organizing, style, hospitality.
Or MOOCs around hobbies: amateur radio, photography, sketching, watercolor, dance, music. Here there’s potential for the tech to meet users halfway.
There are some exceptions for hobbies with a well delimited body of knowledge (eg birdwatching)
While you can certainly get it for free, having a cohort and a badge that perhaps could serve as a prerequisite could benefit all students and all teachers/schools.
As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people... a mechanic is not a mechanical engineer. An electrician, is not an electrical engineer, and so on and so on.
His other anecdote of lecturer is a straw man also, as no one has done that for centuries. The idea of structured education (college) is to force you to learn ideas you would not normally learn, and have a guide to help you understand (the professor), and have those ideas organized in a pattern that aids the greater idea (e.g. taking maths: calculus, differential equations and linear algebra are not only necessary for much of engineering, but they help you to think in ways of solving problems that engineers come across often). This is one of the key problems with self-teaching, they end up not having the vast maths background to tackle complex mathematical problems, and then end up simplifying and making mistakes. In engineering, these mistakes can be deadly. In software, these mistakes can now be deadly).
I asked the electrician wiring my house to not put the phone wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. He asked why. I said because induction will put a 60 cycle hum in the phone wires. He had no idea what that was. I fired him and did the phone wires myself.
When I had a house generator installed (long story) the electrician wanted to run the 12V battery charge line through the same conduit as the A/C. I said wouldn't inductive coupling put 120V on the battery charger? He had no idea what I was talking about. I was unable to explain it to him, and just worked with him to change the design.
Electricians know the code, the rules, can figure out the right wire size from a chart, and how to do things without getting electrocuted. Step outside of that, and they have no idea.
(The electrician tried to run cat3 or some other cheap garbage wire. He also tried to run RG59 coax, which I ripped out and replaced with RG6 quad shielded wire.)
> recent decade
This was in 1999. The wiring has survived several upgrades in digital equipment and bandwidth without change.
> which it probably does
Then it evidently is a problem, as otherwise the filter wouldn't be necessary. Besides, my phone was built in the 1950s.
P.S. I'm not an EE. I'm an ME.
Sounds like you're a tech person! I have a problem with my printer, do you think you could help?
You're right, there are certain types of things that you can learn quite a lot about on the internet - this is especially true if there is no prerequisites. It's my favourite thing about the internet, and I'll never stop being grateful for it. I'm a self-taught hack, but I have a very intelligent/fortunate cousin that went to Berkeley (granted for business), and my interpretation is that it's a contacts/prestige thing. The information is mostly available elsewhere.
I'm curious to see where this discussion goes.
Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first.
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor's degree, there's a minimum amount of knowledge you probably have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).
There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without "climbing the ranks" so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).
It seems then that the technical challenge is certification/assessment. Here, AI could play a role. If a machine can interactively and dynamically have a “conversation” with a person, that is randomised/unique and responsive to the student, all to assess how much they understand a topic, that’d probably do it. Combine it with a certain degree of oversight and random checking and provisions for review/appeal from “actual experts”, and you’d still have something that should scale pretty well beyond the university monopoly.
An additional factor is the importance of cultural/mainstream perception. There’s a lot of “hacking” or gaming of the university assessment system, especially if you contrast the reality with the lofty and important goals of education and edification. I’d be interested to know how many, having gone through the system, really put that much faith in the quality of the “certificate”. I’ve certainly heard stories of some people/institutions wishing to also look at high school or secondary college results because they’re less likely to be “gamed” (though I have no idea how common at all this is).
A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of the jobs that are being hired for. An example is the automation of engineering calculations by high level software such as CAD.
I've gone through the system. I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
I'm not sure solitary self-learning is the only type of learning consistent with a disrupting higher education. If technology is to drive change here, I'd argue that a plurality of competing education/learning resources or services from which an individual can cater their choices to their own needs is what would be aimed for (or at least likely).
> I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
I agree. However, to my point about cultural perception, which I believe plays a large role in the state of higher education, what happens when higher education if universally seen as mostly "weeding"? Are the costs, inconveniences, cultural hegemonies/hangups/snobberies desirable and worth it?
Teachers are fully aware that a "weeder" course is a problem, and make a sincere effort to get as many students through as possible. But nonetheless it results in a lot of attrition.
State schools have a really unique potential here. There are many now that will confer an on-campus bachelors diploma for 100% remote degrees. The coursework is equally rigorous, administered by a single professor with small class sizes, and the exams are proctored. Any attempt at cheating can be easily snuffed out in this environment. MOOCs are a dead end in terms of providing this. But a state school is a respectable degree and I really hope they’ll extend this to STEM subjects soon.
IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order:
1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields.
2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type.
3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.)
Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well.
Most institutions provide very little signalling value.
Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment.
And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system.
American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs".
edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)
Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.
1. if you aren't Stanford, trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to gain back once lost. One bad placement raises alarms and more than one poisons the well for an entire degree program. There aren't many regional employers per degree program, and national/global employers are a "reach job" for most students. This is something that non-elite institutions know in a visceral and painful way. They are so careful with the few regionally well-regarded degree programs they manage to build. The folly of VC world was obvious to those faculty, and their students (such as me), from the start.
2. if you aren't Stanford, most of your students probably really do need a couple years (at least) of in-person instruction before they are ready for the labor force. Again, anyone who has taught at one of these institutions just knows! Once every 10 years you get the type who didn't really need the degree to learn the material, and you do your best to elevate them past the institution's typical bar for outcomes. But the other 9 years, 100% of students require a lot of real work before they are ready.
In other words, most institutions cannot afford to signal without that signal being extremely accurate. AND they don't have the type of students who don't really need the education. So they educate students and then signal the value of hose students not just through grades but also especially through things like referrals, letters, and so on. But, again, I wouldn't expect a Stanford or UIUC or Michigan grad to understand this world.
Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills.
> I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.
This simply isn't true for most students in most regional economies. No one is paying a premium for a piece of paper anymore.
I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations.
I speak with all types of employers for all types of students, in my capacity as a member of those committees/boards. Ranging from high school dropouts finishing their high school diploma later in life to masters students. My comments here are mostly about traditional undergraduate students, though.
I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.
A few thoughts follow.
With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience.
First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of places, but in extremely different role types. I've mostly only been in "normal" roles at low-prestige firms, but I've only been in either pure R&D groups or "elite" product groups at high-prestige firms. So, for me, FAANG-style work looks incredibly different and is completely inaccessible to the average student from my alma mater at basically any point in their career, without substantial additional education. A lot of this personal anecdote is due to comparing my career before and after my (more elite-signalling) PhD. So, it's hard for me to know.
Now, in terms of mentoring, I can say some things.
First, the higher paying firms consistently get our best and brightest students. These students are the ones who only pass through our type of institution once every 5-10 years. Those employees are way more versatile, productive, disciplined, and frankly just intelligent. Are they doing to same work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But FAANG/high finance/et al. does seem to be choosing the absolute cream of the crop. At least from us. They are definitely buying more versatility and higher general intelligence if nothing else. Again, FROM US, a small non-elite school. I know institutional bias means that this may not be true in general.
Second, my impression is that a lot of our students would have a really hard time simply onboarding to tooling at the two FAANGs I know the most about. Think "Java programmer who uses IntelliJ and drops a JAR onto a single VM. Knows about but still isn't very comfortable with things like command lines or version control. Relies on senior engineers for anything more complicated than developing on one or two branches with rare merges and deployment to a single VM". That's a bit of an exaggeration but not far off, so you can see how landing at Google or Facebook might be a painful way for those students to start their career.
FWIW, I think the department is very pragmatics-focused. We aren't failing to teach git because we're too busy teaching automata theory, for example. We don't even teach the latter. So, very focused on software development career prep. But the quality of student and dedication to craft just isn't there. Getting students into internships gives a huge improvement but is still an uphill battle for us. Improving internship placement is therefore a major focus of the alumni's strategic efforts over the next five years. I suspect that with a couple years of full-time work and good mentorship all of our students would be ready for a normal SWE role at FAANG, but straight out of undergrad would fail at even the basics of a FAANG software job.
Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies. But presumably if you stick enough smart people together someone will eventually invent something novel and profitable, even if the median employee never does.
Given the cost of every minute of downtime at FAANG scale, the ability to rescue a production system a few hours faster than your competition is worth embarrassing multiples of your wage premium against non-FAANG engineers.
Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.
However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn.
Making money by educating people is a bad business. It is expensive and time consuming and the more you try to cut expenses the worse the education gets. Non-profit is the right model for it.
If you really want to make money off the back of education build something useful for colleges and universities. They are big complex organizations with specialized needs where off the shelf solutions don’t cut it and there are enough of them to make a nice business out of if you come up with a solution that is dramatically better than what is out there. A lot of the technology solutions that are used barely work but there are few options.
The only one that isn't public and sparten is not rich amd not elite. All are way more lean than most businesses (<10% of staff are non-teaching, and almost all of those are feeding students or keeping buildings standing/clean/powered... I can name every employee on the Administration floor off the top of my head).
If you really want to make money off the back of education... don't. Build your thing and give it away at cost.
But I do understand why someone who only spent time in places like my PhD school would feel differently and view these places as just another industry. I just don't think they are ready for the fact that 90+% of the market competition is way more lean, way more low-profit, and way more human-capital-intensive than any VC is interested in.
When I talk about making money I am talking about system utilized by colleges like enrollment CRMs, grading software etc. In most cases the only way those get made and are supported is through for-profit businesses.
In some countries private universities even get a bad reputation, with exception of a few renowed ones, as their graduates are seen by the employers as having bought their degree, even if they battled throught it as everyone else, e.g. in Portugal.
A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions.
Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to.
A bachelor's is an extension of high school. You show you can assimilate knowledge at a professional level.
A masters shows you can do extensive research of existing knowledge in a narrow field.
A doctorate shows you can perform novel research and add knowledge to a field.
...but perhaps that is not really applicable to all fields of study. In any case, "glorified dropout" is imho too harsh, as it implies a failure. For most people, the economic tradeoff in getting a masters degree or higher (both in terms of tuition and time lost not working) simply makes it a bad choice.
Master's degree was the primary undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degree existed on paper, but it wasn't recognized in the society. People often got their bachelor's and master's on the same day.
At some point, politicians started promoting bachelor's degrees to get people graduate faster. The academia accepted that, but the job market didn't, at least not initially. Because people were not familiar with bachelor's degrees, they often didn't consider them serious degrees. Some people knew them but took them as a negative sign. The idea was that if a university degree is a sign that you can achieve something, leaving the university after bachelor's is sign that you failed at that.
I left Finland a long time ago, and I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.
> I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.
It's OK to say nothing if you have no information to add
A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional degree. Law/medical degrees may be graduate or undergraduate degrees. A bachelor's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a master's degree, and a master's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a doctorate. There may be intermediate degrees between a bachelor's and a master's and between a master's and a doctorate. Not all research doctorates are PhDs. An MD is not necessarily a doctorate, and the doctorate in medicine could be an MD, a PhD, or something else. Having a PhD in medicine may imply that you are not an MD.
Whatever your experiences from the academia may be, the academia is not universally like that.
No. Read again what you wrote. It wasn't a qualified statement about different values in different places, ie "in this culture X is more like Y" it was a general claim with no background:
"A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree"
I don't think this is true.
Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education.
While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offered certificate of completion for $50-$300 per course. These kinds of programs fizzled because even if students did learn the material the certificates did not sufficiently signal to employers that the student had learned it. A friend of mine from one of these universities did an internal study showing that of those students who completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree almost none found employment in their field. This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.
On a more conciliatory note; I generally agree VC ed-tech has been a boondoggle for similar reasons - a combination of misunderstanding education and realizing that no other part of education is monetizable enough to produce the kind of returns VCs want (barring certain extra-ordinary tech innovations that have not been forthcoming e.g. strong AI)
To me, it's not at all surprising that "got the [equivalent of a] degree but didn't have the normal level of interaction with faculty" results in a vastly different outcome.
You're assuming that the credential itself is the signal. For regional economies in the US who hire primarily from regional universities, the credential often isn't the primary signal. They'll ask for a reference and actually talk with a faculty member listed.
Colleges and especially individual faculty have ties to major regional employers. Those employers understand that output is more variable (in large part because input in more variable). Other employers don't know anything about the institution at all and are likely to bin the app for any role that isn't eg low-pay or pure commission.
So the institution maintains relationships with alumni and others making hiring decisions at their "strategic" new grad employers, mostly regional small and medium sized companies. Frank assessments from trusted faculty play an important role in securing first placements. This is particularly true for (low-)paid internships, which are often the primary feeder for new grad positions.
If I know that the institution has mixed output and my phone call to the professor listed as a reference is basically "they completed some online modules but we didn't interact much", then I will probably pass.
Universities have pre-existing weight and "old money" recognition, but there's nothing inherently more "reliable" about them than online. A lot of people cheat in college, a lot of people take courses with inflated grades or courses which teach old concepts, and then have to learn everything again when they get their first job. It's absolutely true that if someone has a degree from a reputable college they very likely know their field, but if someone has an degree from a "reputable" online college then they also very likely know their field.
It's not fair that in order to prove "acquired knowledge" you need to pay over $10K per semester and travel to an expensive college. It would be nice if we start to see people from online universities succeed in the workforce and build great things, then online degrees would likely be accepted more.
If your claim is that this style of studying isn't preparing students for the real world where the problems cannot be easily predicted then I definitely agree. But cramming isn't cheating, students are just trying to succeed within the system.
With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...
Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem.
I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough.
Is that how you meant it?
I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting?
The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.
I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post.
Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.
I misread what you wrote here. I thought your point was that the value of education was merely as a signal for knowledge rather than in the acquisition of knowledge. Rereading your post I see what you were getting at is the capturable value from an ed tech/ed business perspective. Sorry about the misreading.
Textbooks and/or (current) edtech are not going to be effective there.
But in hard scientific topics (mathematics, algorithms, engineering) there are facts and ideas that are taught, and it's equally easy or hard to learn from prose as it is from listening. In my experience you can be very effective self-studying as long as you already have basic background about the field and what's the point. I skipped 2-3 years of math in school by simply reading the textbook over the summer, doing the exercises, and just asking to skip to the next class. You do this a few times and then you realize that in-person classes are also just them reading the textbook to you. I don't regret it whatsoever.
I'd argue the difference is how mathematized a field is, probably along the same lines as SMBC:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png
a(b + c) = ab + ac
It’s easy for me to convince someone that because of this property we get the following:
3(x + 2) = 3x + 6
It’s much harder to convince someone that
3x + 6 = 3(x + 2)
It’s hard to convince someone that factoring is just using the distributive property reading right to left instead of left to right. It’s much harder to convince them of this just from reading it in a book. The nuance will be lost. They need examples that one goes over in a classroom to see this and a book can’t contain enough examples without being too many pages or without boring the reader with what appears to them to be minutia. They can’t grasp the nuance from reading. They grasp it from doing problems and being guided on the problems at the time they do them.
Books and videos can not replace a teacher. Your experience is not the norm and you should not use it as a guide for what is realistically possible for most people.
I agree with the point of your example, but maybe not the choice of example.
For your example, Gallian (which imo is the standard intro algebra book) includes this property in the definition of a ring: "Property 6. a(b + c) = ab + ac and (b + c)a = ba + bc". (Probably in order to disclaim the confusion you're talking about.) Then he goes on to derive 6-7 other properties of groups that will (of course) be useful in the exercises.
I definitely found it's really important when self-studying to pick the right textbook. Definitely you have to be an experienced educator to write a good book that anticipates most of these things. But I agree that it's impossible for any textbook to anticipate every place someone reading it might get stuck. Let's say for a given student it happens 5-6 times in a really high quality textbook like Gallian or Rudin PoMA. They have 3 options (1) ask on mathematics.stackexchange.com and probably get an answer because it's a great community, (2) try to figure it out themselves, or (3) pay $600 and invest 3h/wk to take an algebra class that might cover the first 1/2 of the textbook in 4 months.
I think where we disagree is what are the constraints of the tradeoff between attending a class vs. reading the book. My experience has been that, if the subject is interesting enough, reading a good quality textbook is cheaper and 2-3x faster than taking a course, but at certain points it can be much more challenging. I think where it depends on which student is how much more challenging, i.e., will they be able to dig themselves out of those holes in a few minutes or a few hours. I was personally in the middle of these two extremes, but I still thought it was worth it to self study after taking 3-4 classes in the math department, then I skipped a bunch (7 semesters) of analysis/algebra/topology and came back and took 2-3 grad courses, where I didn't really understand the main goal of the subjects until I took the classes. And then I went into CS industry and never used any of it again. But I don't regret the experience; it was legitimately interesting to learn about math.
I think you have to be legitimately interested in a subject to self study it successfully. But that's true about studying serious math in general though: you have to be unrelentingly into it, or else you're just really misguided and shouldn't be there, given the high competition, poor odds for any future in math, and no practical use for any of the theory.
That's my experience with it and why I made the argument that I made.
I contend you are an outlier in the extreme. I think very few people can read a math book and get anything out of it unless they have had training. For one thing, in lower level math we lie to students all the time. We just can’t be honest about things because students at that level can’t appreciate the insane number of nuances. For example, ask a first year calculus student what “dx” means and their answer will be complete nonsense but they don’t know that. We can’t tell students what “dx” really is because it is quite beyond their level of understanding.
Thanks for the discussion. I appreciate your perspective.
The two properties you quoted are about the fact the distributivity works whether you're multiplying on the left or on the right. That's one possible left-right confusion, but I would argue most weak students believe it holds even when it doesn't, so in a sense they're too permissive in their reasoning.
However, syzarian's example is about a different left-right confusion: whether you can read an equality both forwards and backwards. I've seen this confusion in students: they will readily believe that you can distribute a factor over a sum (going forward), but be very skeptical about the act of factoring out (going backward), even though it's justified by the same equation. In this case, the students aren't permissive enough in their reasoning.
This is the kind of misconception (that equality has a "direction") that's much easier to suss out with an in-person interaction, whether it's with a teacher or other students.
I obviously agree that a human is extremely effective at explaining that "equals" is symmetric and not the same as "implies". I'm just arguing that the task also can be done in prose to similar, if inferior, effect.
I did agree however that because math has so many gotchas like this, then no textbook will ever disclaim all potential sources of confusion like the example by GGP. And so our discussion boils down to the tradeoff between the price and time investment of taking a class vs. the increased difficulty of self-studying. And how different people assign value differently to each side of the tradeoff, which I claim is the root of our disagreement.
this has been doing rounds on twitter how people do not have grasp of basic maths and it points out a good argument for people who have been taught "good basics"... like i recently asked a doctor who says they are bad at maths and they just blurted out 3. i asked why and they responded, "uh.... bodmas?"
its such a small thing really, like in your primary and secondary education, of all the classes you attend, this is just a tiny tiny topic that must've been taught but because you were taught its importance and use it as a building block early on, it just feels like second nature.
like the tables of 2-9. pretty hard for kids to remember but once they do and they are taught to HOW to use it, it really helps them
Whereas ring theory is very much specific to algebra and you're not going to use it programming, doing chemistry, or whatever else outside math. Finding motivation to learn pure math is a bit harder.
GP's example illustrates a good point. I agree with their point.
Up to that point I too thought I could just learn by reading the textbook. University (assuming a good one, mine wasn't world famous but has a good reputation nationally & in Europe) level maths is completely different level than high school level math, and having access to the professors makes a big difference (although I was often the only student coming by at their office hours if it wasn't before a test, so I guess not everyone agrees with that).
You can absolutely do this for university math using textbooks if you're motivated enough. Which I was.
Sorry for the colloquialism. "School" means university in the U.S. tech industry, but apparently not in Europe.
Edit: Reply to child comment before I log off. Haha I agree. The really valuable things I learned from math professors had nothing to do with the curriculum though. It was more like stories about all the people they saw going crazy trying to get tenure, ultimately failing and then seeking revenge against those who denied them; how they all go to conferences sometimes and drink very heavily afterwards in the nearest bar; and just little colloquialisms. Math academia was a really interesting subculture of very interesting people.
My experience was that pretty quickly professors (and TAs) provided insight and guidance I couldn’t (or at least didn’t) get from just reading the textbook. But also that this increases the further you go in your education- in a 200 student auditorium class for linear algebra or calculus the professor isn’t going to be giving you any individual attention but in my school even by the 3rd-4th semester classes were already often small (15-20 students) and we had actual conversations with the professors about the material (and beyond).
And the idea that in, say, computer science, that there is precisely one correct approach to a given problem is also completely bogus once you've moved beyond trivial questions.
Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough.
My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term.
Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.
in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.
is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
The best predictor of being able to apply knowledge is better mastery of that knowledge and the context in which you are applying it, e.g. to be a creative mathematician you must know some things relating to the problems you're solving deeply.
> is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful
Most companies use the following signals
1. A track record of success
2. Intelligence
3. Consentiousness - the willingness to do required work even if you don't want to
4. Stress tolerance
This is somewhat unsatisfying. One would hope you'd also try to detect attitudes or ideologies that blind you to entire solution spaces or being a massive jerk and alienating people around you.
You survived the 3-5 year ordeal and got your BSc or MSc, this implies you can apply some knowledge in some way.
> in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.
The signal universities provide is not perfect, or even very strongly correlated with anyone's ability to excel in a specific domain. But it is somewhat positively correlated, which means using it as employment filter will weed out more bad than good candidates, which makes hiring cheaper and less risky. In other words: however bad the correlation is, it's already good enough to be useful.
> is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful?
I worry this is an anti-inductive problem: i.e. if you can measure the right factors and predict if a person will be successful accurately enough, you can make people successful (look at it as closed-loop control problem) - but it's most likely cheaper to just make them seem successful instead. The measure becomes a target, and so eventually will cease to become a good measure.
(In a sense, BSc and MSc titles are suffering from just that. They're no longer anywhere as strong a signal than they were 50 years ago.)
> And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
Unfortunately, the two goals - teaching for economic prospects, and educating for a rich and successful life in a more general sense - are at odds with each other.
I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this.
Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test.
So this is your class population; now weed them out.
Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test.
Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them.
You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try.
Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.
No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk.
But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.
It has? You are describing every centralised college admissions exam, from the Chinese NCEE ("gaokao") to the Indian JEE-A or the French concours for admission to the better universities...
That is not the point of a liberal higher education, though.
Historically (for much longer than a century) people were tutored k-12 in their own homes, with their families and neighbors, and not in these government-run public schools. You could learn whatever you wanted from books at home, and a governess and key instructors.
Still, you were sent off to college at a certain age, to be finished as either a man or a woman at a place like Harvard or a women’s college. The purpose was not principally to teach you math or anthropology that you couldn’t otherwise learn yourself (though you would learn some math and anthropology). There was another purpose
If your family was wealthy enough for you to be economically inactive as a youth, and to pay for said governess and instructors.
Higher education was for the rich, too. As you said, a different purpose, mostly social (definitely social for the wealthy young women).
All those little, often church-supported, colleges and land-grant state universities and teachers' colleges that sprang up all over the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That was a revolution: higher education for the non-rich, and mostly for practical purposes.
But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0.
I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was
(1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way,
(2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and
(3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech.
I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.
Most people don't even believe that becoming more educated makes you "smarter". "Smart" is this CPU clock speed you naturally have and then "education" is running the cpu through various benchmarks.
School is just standardization of the benchmarks so it can't be cheap and freely available. We don't want everyone to join the guild. As a society we want joining the guild to be as prohibitively expensive as possible while pretending we wish the guild could be open and free. All a racket and bullshit for 99% of the population.
Importantly, though, the topic here is higher education, not education. Higher education refers to a type of business. And the business of higher education isn't in the business of education at all, but rather in the business of socialization. The value proposition is exposure to other, generally like-minded, people in which to engage with and form bonds with, particularly with respect to mating.
While at some level something like this very forum could disrupt that there is something missing. Tech hasn't solved for the "human touch" and until then there will be value in stepping out into the real world. And so long as there is value in existing in the real world, people will pay for that.
Education in itself doesn't need disrupting. If anything, it needs stability.
I think this absolutely misses the mark on the two most critical factors. Number 1: *exposure to and interaction with a community of peers engaged in personal improvement in the same manner*
I can read Aristotle and Mills and Kant on my own in my living room; but this is not the same as being part of a book club (or a college course) reading these texts and discussing them. Finding positions, explaining them to your peers, perhaps defending those viewpoints, listening to others do the same, challenging them on their viewpoints, etc. These are examples of a secondary layer of context and understanding of a subject that is inherently not replicable in isolated learning.
I have a friend who deadlifts over 750 lbs. Do you think he goes to Planet Fitness and hops on the elliptical for 20 minutes and then goes home? No. He goes to a gym filled with similarly powerful, driven lifters. He discusses training loads, regimens, diet, etc. with his peers. The knowledge transfer between skilled practitioners is critical to master of a craft past a certain point. Sure, almost anyone who lifts for 3 years with even moderate dedication can eventually break 3 plates. But 5 plates? 6? 7? 8?! No, that requires something more: a petri dish for cultivating improvement; a community of similarly motivated individuals.
Number 2: A subject matter expert who can react and interact with you and your peers. Having a SME to highlight what is critical, to deprioritize what is 'cruft', to dispel or correct misunderstandings/misconceptions, to push the depth of the learning/training to a more advanced level; this is a massive advantage that in-person education has over impersonal, technologically-distributed courses.
Sure, some things are easily teachabale over YouTube. One of my favorite examples: Simple mechanical work. I've used YouTube multiple times to supplement my existing knowledge & owner's manual. It's helped me flush brake lines, install oil coolers, replace a water pump, and align headlights. Work like this, that is to say, work that doesn't require a high level of expertise, is easily transferable via YouTube. This is akin to taking notes during a lecture. More complicated work, like... say, dropping an engine, replacing the crankshaft, and remounting the engine is a task that requires a higher skill/knowledge base to perform correctly. I would not trust someone to do that with purely internet-based instruction.
Lastly, I would like to say that I believe scale necessarily diminishes the quality of what is being produced. You cannot teach 4000 students online as well as you can teach 400 in person; and likewise a 400 person lecture is necessarily a lower-quality educational product than a 40 person lecture & follow up socratic seminar.
I predict that very soon we will have AI tutors like ChatGPT, and then entire courses will be automated in technology. We already have "100% tech" online schools with one teacher per 100+ students or no teachers at all; but with AI tutors, I expect these schools will become much more effective, much more popular, and ultimately much more prevalent. I don't believe that the traditional school system will be replaced or that any public schools will become online-only: in-person learning is still necessary for many students, as are factors like free lunch and mandatory socialization, and AI will never solve those issues. But I do believe that fully-online learning, which is already rapidly growing, will start to grow even more rapidly.
And this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Frankly, many people's public education system sucks because of lack of resources, and I don't see any alternative way that it can improve, because of lack of resources. For the students, a good AI tutor can be much more helpful than a teacher (and much more patient). For the teachers, it may be harder to get a "traditional" general-elective teaching job, but maybe instead they can teach small focus groups in special classes, where the teaching is much more fun and interesting, but also harder to automate. The state of education in modern society is awful and this has serious consequences (see: recent elections); a low-cost, effective teaching solution would be a huge benefit to global society.
The next version of it however...
Why is this an advantage?
Actually, most historians tend to trace the oldest university back to the late 1100s (or maybe up to a hundred years older), with the University of Bologna being considered the first university. This is especially true if you consider university to be less "place of learning" and more an intentional community of students and their instructors.