Brainstorm with HN: Let's fix ridiculously expensive education
Hi HN,
I've been thinking about the problems with education, and what we (hackers, entrepreneurs, you name it) can do about it. I'm going to focus on education on the university level, mainly because that's what people are talking so much about nowadays.
What I think is that at the university level, it's not so much the actual learning that we have to improve: it's grading. People can learn by themselves (many have been doing just that for a long time), and while there's certainly room for improvement, this isn't the part about universities I think needs replacing. Grading, or getting a degree, on the other hand, is a much more significant problem: employers want to know that you've learned something; when going through a thousand CVs, they don't want to have to extensively test every potential employee to see whether they really know what they claim to know. Thus, degrees.
Of course, there have been some great improvements here. Coursera, for example, have made the big university courses more accessible for all. But I don't doubt better things are yet to come, so let's discuss those: what do you think is the largest thing that needs serious improvement in education? What, if anything, do you miss from these projects such as Coursera? What are your ideas to make (online) education even better?
Discuss. :)
13 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 41.3 ms ] threadBeing aware of what is possible. Most people, by my observation of online discussions, think their own education was pretty good, and it's the "other guy" who might possibly have a poor education. But it just might be (as I think, after living in more than one country) that a great many people, perhaps including me, have plenty more to learn that they COULD learn. Maybe the current system is underpeforming more than we imagine, and more than we CAN imagine after receiving the schooling we each received.
One thing that I think is missing from both online education and education at the university is personalization. At UCLA, I sat in lecture halls with hundreds of students, and we all got the same words. It would be nice to sign up for the lecture from the professor who makes movie analogies instead of sports analogies. Or maybe I prefer a professor who writes on the board instead of using a powerpoint.
As a Kaplan instructor (SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT), I would explain a question differently depending on the student. Was this a student who had pacing problems? I might emphasize elimination strategies or guessing intelligently. Was it a student who consistently fell for trap answers? I'd advise them to try to think like the test maker and anticipate the traps. The best part about online classes is that you can capture this data pretty easily. But so far, no one is using it to deliver a more personal online learning experience.
I would love to use the Internet as a means to educate people. I am still trying to figure out how. Among other things, I would like to create a simulation (aka "game"). That's a longstanding dream. I have done things like start a design doc, but sometimes it seems like the dreams I have are impossible dreams.
Effectively reaching your target audience is the big challenge. I think it only gets bigger with the Internet because of the huge diversity of people online.
Let me try to answer this seriously: So, the problem with your idea is that Universities are not just workshops but they are also places where research is done, where people work day in day out cranking out experiments for a pittance. If you want to optimize for a single cost function: Money, you will find that these people lose the training that got them into science on the first place. They sure as hell wouldn't go into research because the pay for Grad. Student or a Professor sucks. Also, all we would be trying to mint out in this case would be business men and lawyers. Guess what? Tech does not pay as well as you would think it would.
Also, there is a special place for classrooms and Universities irrespective of this "free distribution of information" which AFAIK has been existing since the 16th century (books): Mentorship. One of the greatest experiences that going to a world class school can give you is the ability to interact with people who have significantly shit tons of experience than you, have the wisdom and depth of knowledge in the subject.
Mentorship is one of those pieces that the universities would innovate with. I totally agree with you on mentorship and I definitely think it comtributes to one's success. As a result, if universities implemented a mentorship program, they would make more money because their students would end up making more money.
And regarding the business men and lawyers and technology does not pay well, I just had another comment saying the universities would only churn out software engineers. Regardless of that, it's supply and demand anyways that corrects this.
Most universities take large slices out of research grants. There are some research projects that have been commercially used. However, the process of making something commercially viable is... not easy: Apply for patents, think about designing a product, setting up a company etc. All this stuff takes a ton of time and takes people way out of the stuff they want to do: Research.
> Mentorship is one of those pieces that the universities would innovate with. I totally agree with you on mentorship and I definitely think it comtributes to one's success. As a result, if universities implemented a mentorship program, they would make more money because their students would end up making more money.
It is rather more subtle than that: So very few Professors get into the field wanting to teach and mentor people (I am using the term mentor here more as it should be used between a Professor and an undergrad student who happens to take his class rather than a Professor and a person he is advising). Most of them get into Universities with research as their primary objective and teaching as a requirements. However, in a good school which hires excellent candidates eventually ensures that they also turn out to be excellent mentors. I worry that an organization that is using money as the optimization function will find it very hard to build something as sophisticated, it is easier for them to higher guidance counsellors who sit all day in a room.
> And regarding the business men and lawyers and technology does not pay well, I just had another comment saying the universities would only churn out software engineers. Regardless of that, it's supply and demand anyways that corrects this.
I would find both of these abhorrent: Society is just not about money alone. There are people out there who make way lower on the cost function of money but still have jobs that require learning how to think in a certain manner and that requires going to school.
You pay for your tuition by having x% of your salary deducted from future pay packets.
This does not “fix” anything. All it does is make the cost of education higher for those who earn less, like teachers and nurses. Why? Because they take longer to pay off their loans than Engineers, Lawyers, and those in Finance.
An let’s not even get on to the point that Universities are really there for research as well as teaching. We shouldn't be incentivising them to solely churn out future Software Engineers, etc...
Moreover, if universities only churned out software engineers then the supply of software engineers would be very high. This would make the demand for them lower and thus their salaries.
In terms of what's wrong and suggestions for improvement, it's hard to know where to start. One big, doable change may just be more standardized testing. The price of education is simply a reflection of the fact that employers and students overvalue degrees. This leads to this perverse effect that causes people to enroll because they feel like they have to, not because they want to. The whole dynamic just seems to create an enormous amount of problems. Tying so much economic value to a college degree drives prices and attendance up and the effectiveness and true value of education down.