Given the nature of the HN community, I'm actually surprised by how many pro-college comments I see here. There's maybe a 50/50 split, of pro vs. anti-college sentiment, mostly because colleges are the only place where things like medicine, real STEM, and so forth can be taught.
But I'm floored that college remains such an established institution. With the ridiculous cost and unhelpful nature of a college degree post-graduation (at least for most non-tech/STEM/medicine majors), why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline?
The amount of people I know saddled with student debt who do nothing remotely close to their major, and who didn't even enjoy studying to begin with, is astounding. And this pattern repeats itself in Europe, though somewhat differently. There, instead of starting companies, people get a 6-year long Masters in Entrepreneurship or Marketing or Business, and go on to work unfulfilling middle-management jobs for stagnant, uninspiring companies.
I'm sure this is a prevalent malaise in Asia and developed parts of Africa and LatAm as well.
I don't think free college would fundamentally solve the problem, which is that college delivers very little value for most, and a lot of value for very few. For most studies, it's no longer a good system (IMO).
I think universities have a sort of impossible position.
One direction, heavily pushed by industry and government, is that they should be a sorting mechanism, identifying the best and most capable students so they can be discovered by industry.
Another direction, pushed by government, is that they should be centers of learning and scholarship, capable of producing high quality research and researchers.
These two goals are not mutually exclusive, but they are not particularly compatible, either. Exams are essentially a giant distraction and stressor on the whole learning process, but they are also essential for the first objective. Deep, foundational course material is basically mandatory for the second objective, but the first objective prefers material closer to vocational training.
For the first objective, parents and students know that the best institution is the most prestigious one. For the second one, the best institution is the one with the best researchers and teachers.
For the first objective, it's better (if you can afford it) if the course is incredibly expensive. The biggest predictor of success is the wealth of your parents, so when your peers all have wealthy parents, you are likely to be connected to a large number of successful people.
For the second objective, it's best if school is free, so the truly interested and talented are not excluded.
For me, the position of the university as a societal institution is threefold:
1) Foster deep, foundational learning in an interested and talented portion of the populous.
2) Fund basic research, give academia a home, and further scientific progress.
3) Act as a filtration mechanism.
But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart. The university as an institution is probably best suited to fund research and science. Filtration mechanisms can be established with independent standardized testing and learning programs like Lambda School and OpenClassrooms etc. Deep, foundational learning is possible online, and parts of this learning could be delegated to colleges specialized in specific fields (medicine, technology, etc.).
I would also expect things like community colleges to spring up for associates-degree level education and vocational training.
which begs the question - why must university be a filtration system such that others (like employers) get to have a free-ride off of it?
Presumably it's just an unintended consequence of university study and qualification - that employers don't want the expense of sorting out candidates, and that someone capable of graduating with a degree must have some level of competency.
So, what if the gov't make university degree something that employers cannot discriminate with - like race or religion. If they want to ensure their candidate is capable, they can administer a test (or pay a central examination service provider for such a test). A candidate looking for jobs do not require a university degree, but do require taking this test (or have taken a prior test and show the results).
This way, university can remain "pure", rather than a gateway which people pay as an entry-fee for employment.
Employers don't want the liability of sorting. They are outsourcing the legal status of being non-discriminatory.
If a large company were to give an IQ test to every applicant, they would get sued and asked to prove it does not discriminate against a protected class. If a large company hires only from Harvard, they just say that Harvard is non-discriminatory, so that policy is as well
> If a large company were to give an IQ test to every applicant, they would get sued and asked to prove it does not discriminate against a protected class. If a large company hires only from Harvard, they just say that Harvard is non-discriminatory, so that policy is as well
It is just as easy to prove that a pro-elite-university hiring practice has a differential impact on a variety of protected classes as one that uses an IQ test, and there's probably better evidence for lots of jobs that performance is predicted by IQ test results, to overcome the presumption of disparate impact discrimination from the differential impact.
IQ tests, however, have a greater cultural awareness of the potential for illegality, which probably translates to a greater risk of an employee talking to an attorney and thus a suit being filed in the first place.
Hiring from elite universities exclusively is a safer way to discriminate because there's less chance that the victims will seek redress, not because it outsources responsibility.
> It is just as easy to prove that a pro-elite-university hiring practice has a differential impact on a variety of protected classes as one that uses an IQ test, and there's probably better evidence for lots of jobs that performance is predicted by IQ test results, to overcome the presumption of disparate impact discrimination from the differential impact.
If this is true, then why haven't elite universities been successfully sued for discriminatory admissions (recently that is)?
> If this is true, then why haven't elite universities been successfully sued for discriminatory admissions (recently that is)?
Employment and educational discrimination are covered by different laws, so it's not the same question, and,
Even if the standards applied were the same, whether admissions are illegally discriminatory and whether hiring by graduation is would be very different questions.
tho it doesn't have to be an IQ test. It could be the same sort of examination a university would administer for their degrees for their field. Except the result of the test is independent from the degree, and you can take the test without having paid for a degree (you just pay for the test - or the bill is picked up by employer, or whatever arrangement the market settles on).
Normal universities in France do this (no filtering), it comes with a bunch of issues as well, notably that special schools / programs do filter and they end up being seen as more prestigious.
> But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart.
I disagree, I think a demonstrable strength of the Anglo-Saxon university system is the integration of teaching and research. Look at countries especially in Europe that don't integrate and see how their universities suffer.
In my experience in an American school, most of the professors are only interested in their research and not the teaching. The ones that were only teaching because they liked it and not doing any research were much better at it.
But the relatively weak performance of for example French universities (split between teaching and research) compared to British, American or Swiss universities (unified) suggests that the outcome is not as you think.
Take a look at my response to the other response to my grandparent comment.
I think the role of a university is just too large. Universities cannot do everything at once, so bloating is a concomitant effect. This bloating decreases the efficacy of the university system on all fronts.
A good college is all of what you say, but that's not what college is today (for most people who go to college, not top-tier Ivy Leagues and such). For the less fortunate, college is more of a "slog your way through four years of shitty living and disinterest to get a probably worthless piece of paper".
Lambda school exists right now. If it is successful then it will gradually start eating into college market share. It seems like mostly the system has to just wait and see for now.
One thing that it could do, I suppose, is reshape the bureaucracy to accommodate a reality of a people educated at lambda schools. There are forms asking you about your education level. Important forms. Immigration for example. Not being able to check the college box could hurt you.
If someone has gone to lambda school, and self taught in their free time, could they work as a researcher? Or is that gated behind phd admission which is gated behind a bachelors? That might need a change too.
Treating college as an extension of high school in America seems to come from the post-civil-rights era as a convenient economic weed-out of certain segments of society from even entry-level work :/
I could not agree more. Replacing classism, racism, etc with an -apparent- meritocracy helped the middle class to swallow continuing inequality: instead of keeping the poor folks out - we kept the uneducated out - forgetting the two groups overlap heavily. The number of people my age who speak of their high-end expensive education as if it was entirely merit based (“you have no idea how hard we were worked to get our Degrees!”) always irks me. The worlds best philosophers probably never had a chance to learn to write, the worlds best leaders enough to eat, etc.
As a non-college graduate who’s career is going fairly well, I can only hurry to gather as much capital as I can before a real meritocracy emerges: I am not a genius, and there are enough poor geniuses with less opportunities than me to eclipse me many times over.
Yeah all this talk like there is logic and reason that is honest. It's the way it is so the system can mostly stop people from learning, while looking like teachers. It will be endlessly discussed as though it is a natural phenomenon that is impossible to understand, when all it's for is a method of controlling those who work without choice. Simple to fix, impossible to take away from them.
The cost and debt problems are outrageous and needs to be fixed.
But I don't understand the anti-college sentiment on HN. It's a feature that you can have no idea what you want to do at 18, start with a bio major, switch to history because you had a really good professor as a freshman, and then graduate to do something completely unrelated.
I get the impetus to see this an unimportant, but a trade-school only world is one with an even narrower elite, less scientific and historical literacy throughout the broader population, and more vulnerable to demagogues and conspiracy theories.
Finding an alternative to the social part of college is the real challenge. The transferring of knowledge is already commoditized and available freely online.
I suppose it wouldn't help much to tell them that, even had they been attending classes in person and gaining the benefits of cohabitation, they would still be getting financially destroyed by a broken system.
This is really just shining a harsher light on what was already there. I feel for these students for the _additional_ pain they have to endure.
Freshman class sizes have to be way down right? If I were a parent to a kid of that age, I'd be encouraging them to take a gap year or knock out credits at a community college.
Some universities are preventing this by saying that your spot the next year is not guaranteed. So you would have to reapply. You will be competing with all incoming freshman and everyone that deferred. We have friends paying 60K for online school. They consider it to be paying 60K to hold their spot.
$60k for a single year? I can’t help but shake my head as the absurdity of that. We’ve done a disservice to younger generations if it cost that much for a single year of education.
That’s not a normal college expense, and in fact a lot of schools with expenses that high do so while offering means-based scholarships. So when you read a story about someone at a $60K school paying $60K, usually it’s a signal that you’re reading a story from a very wealthy individual circumstance — not to opine positive vs. negative but context is important.
The freshman class at the university I’m currently attending is the largest one they have ever had.
Now, we are a more “affordable “ state university, but it’s still $6k tuition for a semester, plus many people seem to have gotten duped into paying for campus housing even though it seemed like high chance classes would end up online one way or another.
We decided to save exactly $0 for our kid’s college education. Our theory is that by the time he goes the system will have imploded and far cheaper options will emerge. The whole system is on the verge of collapse. Also recent reports of parents negotiating between colleges for discounts like you do at a car dealership have annoyed me immensely. This whole thing is disgusting and insane.
This sounds very foolhardy. Why not save the money in case? In the (IMHO) highly unlikely situation that the system collapses, you'll have a pot of money you can spend on something else.
Exactly, why bet on your child's future. Maybe whatever the trend is around then costs equivalent amount of money that you need to pay for college now.
Also, as far as other professions which require licenses are concerned, you'll always have to go through some institution to do that job, lawyers, civil engineers, doctors, etc.
If you’re really that worried about it, save it in a joint taxable account. That way you’re “just” gambling away the preferential tax treatment (substantial) of 529 because you’re pretty sure you’d take the 10% penalty when it blows up. That’s much more equal bet than not saving.
Colleges are one of the few structures where the normal relationship between a provider and a customer is inverted such that it would appear that the person paying for the service is under the obligation to perform for the person receiving the payment.
To give an example. The student is the customer, paying 30k a semester, yet if they go into the bursar to get some record corrected they are treated as if they are the hindrance in the system by way of long lines and apathetic clerks.
Another example: a student comes into class 10 minutes late each day because the class overlaps with his job. The professor or TA reprimands the student for essentially putting their needs first, despite the fact that the student is almost directly paying the professor's salary.
Another example: student falls asleep in class. Professor stops the class to embarrass the student.
In all these cases it's as if the professor is paying the student to be apart of the school and the obligation of performance is on the student.
In reality, the institutional responsibility of providing value should be on the professor and university. The individual responsibility of performance should be on the student. And yet the roles are the same as if a college were a public school, as if the professor and the school does not have a strong and direct responsibility to their customers/patrons. That it were the student's responsibility to validate the school and teacher.
Schools really are a "unique" form of business. The virus has uncovered what a lot of us knew all along; mainly that they don't provide the value even remotely close to what their price tag suggests. They perpetuate because their customers are essentially still children, people being routed in society by society, and have not had the experience of having any real, consequential responsibility in the world. People who don't need to perform any cost-benefit analysis because the decision is already made for them and the cost is usually hoisted onto someone else. Otherwise, few sane and independent people would willingly enter into a contract where you pay so much to be treated like an agent-less underling.
Like a lot of large organizations, universities exist so that they continue to exist. It's foolish to think that they have the interests of individuals in mind.
Or so at least that has been my regretful experience excitedly waiting to be spit out of high school to learn the depths of programming in a place that sincerely respects learning, and instead spending 4 years in yet another purgatory to the real world.
At least I never have to hear the words again is this going to be on the final?
I love school and work from home, but school from home doesn’t work as well for a couple reasons:
- the professors are completely unprepared to do it effectively. I’m surprised they are struggling as much as they are. Many don’t seem to be drawing on any departmental prior experience, or even taking simple training on stuff like how to run a Webex meeting. Some professors clearly know how to do it better and it makes a HUGE difference. So that’s a big issue with the current situation. Some profs are doing a stellar job this semester, others are doing a completely awful job.
- for me, face time with fellow students is really helpful for learning, more so than face time with coworkers being helpful to work. However, in lectures you don’t get that much time to interact with other students anyway, so to me it’s not worth the time of getting to campus
'Learn from home' works very well. College is not about learning, but being among a wide range of people in their prime looking for mates, though. I am not sure we have entirely figured out how to replicate that at home.
I admittedly haven't personally used Tinder, so do correct me if I am wrong, but from what I have learned from reading about it and listening to others who have used it, Tinder seems more like the high school mating pool. Which is to say that you get everyone who happens to live within some geographic area thrown into a pile and leaves you to sort through the mess.
The upsell from colleges is that they filter out the "undesirables", for lack of a better way to put it, and bring the desirable people together from around the country and even the world. The more entrance requirements placed on the students, the more desirable the school is to attend for access to the highest calibre mating pool.
Lockdown is destroying a year's worth of education across the world.
That's how many lives? I'd say a million?
Anyone bothered to work it out?
It's complex, there is total loss. There are delays. It'll be over the next 3 years, give or take a year. International students might never come back.
But I'm floored that college remains such an established institution. With the ridiculous cost and unhelpful nature of a college degree post-graduation (at least for most non-tech/STEM/medicine majors), why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline?
The amount of people I know saddled with student debt who do nothing remotely close to their major, and who didn't even enjoy studying to begin with, is astounding. And this pattern repeats itself in Europe, though somewhat differently. There, instead of starting companies, people get a 6-year long Masters in Entrepreneurship or Marketing or Business, and go on to work unfulfilling middle-management jobs for stagnant, uninspiring companies.
I'm sure this is a prevalent malaise in Asia and developed parts of Africa and LatAm as well.
I don't think free college would fundamentally solve the problem, which is that college delivers very little value for most, and a lot of value for very few. For most studies, it's no longer a good system (IMO).