5 ms·

Universities: excellence v equity

27 points by Futurebot 11y ago

xacaxulu 11y ago
paywall
- sokoloff 11y ago
  In general, click the "web" link at top of page to google search, then click through.
- kornish 11y ago
  I couldn't reproduce - you can just close the modal that pops up with no adverse effects. In any case, when an article is paywalled, you generally get around it by clicking the "web" link under the HN title, then clicking on the top result in Google.
  - MattyMc 11y ago
    "You have reached your article limit." Disappointing.
    - sokoloff 11y ago
      Incognito mode or using another browser is usually enough to work around these. (I haven't read enough economist articles this month to check for sure on this site.)
    - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
      Delete all cookies for the site, reload.
      - poooogles 11y ago
        Works in this case, won't on most modern paywalls. New Yorker for example uses Supercookies/Fingerprinting to give your UUID back to you.
tokenadult 11y ago
To help out readers who encounter a paywall (I didn't), I'll quote two key paragraphs from the article kindly submitted here. First, not quite halfway down in the article, "What happened in America then happened in Europe and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, in South Korea in the 1980s, and is now happening the world over. Student numbers are growing faster than global GDP. So hungry is the world for higher education that enrolment is growing faster than purchases of that ultimate consumer good, the car (see chart 1). The global tertiary enrolment ratio—the proportion of the respective age cohort enrolled in university—increased from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; the number of countries with an enrolment ratio of more than half went up from five to 54 over the period. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where “massification” is not much in evidence yet." So undergraduate higher education enrollment is becoming commonplace all over the world. That, in turn, means that young people possessing an undergraduate degree is now more and more commonplace, so the job market has begun regarding postgraduate degrees more and more. From farther along in the article, "As first degrees become standard, more people are getting postgraduate qualifications to stand out from the crowd. In both America and Britain, 14% of the adult workforce have a postgraduate degree; and despite the increase in supply, the postgraduate premium has increased in both America and Britain, especially since 2000. There was a time, points out Stephen Machin, professor of economics at University College London, when a postgraduate degree depressed wages; but that was when maths PhDs worked mainly in academia, not in the financial sector." The article, by the way, is a "leader" (an editorial) leading into a special report section in which The Economist does more detailed reporting on the role of higher education around the world and its societal effects. A crucial question, which deserves more research, is to what degree attending higher education institutions actually provides education, making young people smarter and more capable, and to what degree it simply provides social signaling, distinguishing one job-seeker seeker who had wealth and leisure time to pursue a degree from another job-seeker who had fewer personal resources. It is not clear yet that postsecondary education adds as much value at the margins as primary education does. The clear development model contrast between east Asia and Africa is instructive about this issue: at independence, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African countries developed national universities and attempted to provide higher education to local elites as soon as they became independent. Many of the college graduates from those countries then became part of the brain drain of emigration to the West. Meanwhile, in east Asia the focus of national education policy was on broad access to good-quality primary and secondary education, and industrialization and transition to a post-industrial economy in those countries was built on a base of broad masses of literate, numerate workers. And, as today's article reports, in the end east Asia ended up with more young people in higher education than in Africa anyhow, but along the way everyone became at least minimally well educated. For the same number of dollars, it probably does a country more good to improve primary education for the many than to broaden access to higher education for the few.
roymurdock 11y ago
> The more people have degrees, the more employers will insist on recruiting graduates. In many countries jobs such as teaching and nursing, which did not require a degree 30 years ago, are now reserved for graduates. When just a small elite went to university, plenty of decent jobs were available to those with only secondary schooling. That is no longer true. This is the most interesting part of the education puzzle to me. There is quite clearly an oversupply of people with degrees, both undergraduate and post-graduate, but the harsh reality is that you still need one due to credentialism, the shrinking number of "low-hanging fruit" problems, and, paradoxically, the increased supply of people with degrees. One solution from a hiring perspective is a DaaS (Degree as a Service) model such as HourlyNerd [1] or Gigster (YC15) [2] where you can hire well-pedigreed business and CS graduates as micro consultants or coders. But in the future the biggest change I expect to see is one in the hiring attitude. As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate. I expect brand names to decrease in value as businesses and decision makers increase prioritization on demonstrated ability (Github, portfolio of work) and cost to hire, which will generally be lower for less well-branded schools and alternative methods of education, such as apprenticeships and online education. That's just my gut feeling from personal observations. There's a good chance I'm 100% wrong and getting a branded education will be more important than ever due to the high number of candidates w/ degrees, and the increasing importance of connections and network. That seems to be they way SV is moving these days. [1] https://hourlynerd.com/ https://hourlynerd.com/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/
- pc86 11y ago
  > As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate. We agree there, but doesn't the next sentence represent a fundamental shift in thinking? I would think it much more likely for businesses and managers (particularly HR) to simply shift their signalling from Bachelor's degrees to Master's degrees rather than from Bachelor's degrees to a context-sensitive review of your body of work. It's much easier to say "I have a Master's in CS from Stanford" than it is to say "Here's my GitHub portfolio, let's talk about a few of my projects." I'd much rather folks focus on what they've actually accomplished rather than the institution they happened to attend, but I don't see it happening, particularly from HR folks who are not technically inclined and are simply trying to get a pile of 500 resumes down to a dozen. And like you said with SV, in elite circles you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a job ad looking for someone from {Stanford|Harvard|MIT}.
throwaway999888 11y ago
While the authors are busy jerking themselves sore over American Exceptionalism, I'm still as alienated by the rampant focus on academic pedigree and class from Americans as I was when I first learned about it. In my corner of the world, most people have these considerations when they choose the school-route (or not) in life: - Tired of reading and writing? Get an education in some trade. - Want a specific job that requires higher education? Continue school and get good enough grades. - Don't know what you want to do? Choose one of the former based on your perceived abilities and preferences. While there is to a degree some academic inflation, as long as there are people who are more inspired by doing hands-on work instead of becoming a white collar worker, I think things will be OK. Oh, and not having a college or university degree is not looked down upon. At all. Only the no/low-skill jobs, with low pay, are actively avoided if people can avoid them. So we have more of the poorer immigrants ending up with those jobs.
- umanwizard 11y ago
  I really don't think class and pedigree mattering is an American thing. I suspect you made the common error of pointing out something good about one of the ultra highly developed European countries, noticing that it's not the case in the poorer and more unequal US, and inexplicably thinking the US is the outlier. Edit: just to expand on this, the problems with the US are a result of the complicated system of cultural, political, and institutional issues. There isn't a Dictator of America who can wake up tomorrow and decree that everyone will believe in some set of enlightened values. So whenever I hear "I can't believe Americans do/think/believe X, that's so silly!" from Europeans, I can't help but think it's no more helpful than "isn't it quaint that Syrians care so much about religion" or "why can't Jews and Palestineans just get along?"
  - benbreen 11y ago
    The parent comment fails to rings true to me in the case of the three European countries I have experience with, the UK, France, and Portugal. All three are in many ways even more obsessed with class-based academic hierarchies. For instance, students of Portugal's oldest university (Universidade de Lisboa) regularly wear 18th century style robes and were almost universally considered to be snobby rich kids by the Portuguese people I talked to about it. Oxbridge and the ancient English public schools that feed into it (Eton, Harrow, etc) are even more pedigree-obsessed than their US equivalents. And by all first-hand accounts I've heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be filled with urban elites bound for government posts. Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world, it's just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal points for this global obsession.
lumberjack 11y ago
What a bunch of bollocks. There is no connection between countries trying to improve their research facilities and the privitisation of undergraduate education. The latter is just more profitable and goes along with the trend to privitise all state services which has been going on for a while.

27 points by Futurebot 11y ago

xacaxulu 11y ago

paywall

sokoloff 11y ago
In general, click the "web" link at top of page to google search, then click through.
kornish 11y ago
I couldn't reproduce - you can just close the modal that pops up with no adverse effects. In any case, when an article is paywalled, you generally get around it by clicking the "web" link under the HN title, then clicking on the top result in Google.
- MattyMc 11y ago
  "You have reached your article limit." Disappointing.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    Incognito mode or using another browser is usually enough to work around these. (I haven't read enough economist articles this month to check for sure on this site.)
  - PeterWhittaker 11y ago
    Delete all cookies for the site, reload.
    - poooogles 11y ago
      Works in this case, won't on most modern paywalls. New Yorker for example uses Supercookies/Fingerprinting to give your UUID back to you.

tokenadult 11y ago

To help out readers who encounter a paywall (I didn't), I'll quote two key paragraphs from the article kindly submitted here. First, not quite halfway down in the article, "What happened in America then happened in Europe and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, in South Korea in the 1980s, and is now happening the world over. Student numbers are growing faster than global GDP. So hungry is the world for higher education that enrolment is growing faster than purchases of that ultimate consumer good, the car (see chart 1). The global tertiary enrolment ratio—the proportion of the respective age cohort enrolled in university—increased from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; the number of countries with an enrolment ratio of more than half went up from five to 54 over the period. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where “massification” is not much in evidence yet." So undergraduate higher education enrollment is becoming commonplace all over the world. That, in turn, means that young people possessing an undergraduate degree is now more and more commonplace, so the job market has begun regarding postgraduate degrees more and more. From farther along in the article, "As first degrees become standard, more people are getting postgraduate qualifications to stand out from the crowd. In both America and Britain, 14% of the adult workforce have a postgraduate degree; and despite the increase in supply, the postgraduate premium has increased in both America and Britain, especially since 2000. There was a time, points out Stephen Machin, professor of economics at University College London, when a postgraduate degree depressed wages; but that was when maths PhDs worked mainly in academia, not in the financial sector." The article, by the way, is a "leader" (an editorial) leading into a special report section in which The Economist does more detailed reporting on the role of higher education around the world and its societal effects. A crucial question, which deserves more research, is to what degree attending higher education institutions actually provides education, making young people smarter and more capable, and to what degree it simply provides social signaling, distinguishing one job-seeker seeker who had wealth and leisure time to pursue a degree from another job-seeker who had fewer personal resources. It is not clear yet that postsecondary education adds as much value at the margins as primary education does. The clear development model contrast between east Asia and Africa is instructive about this issue: at independence, Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African countries developed national universities and attempted to provide higher education to local elites as soon as they became independent. Many of the college graduates from those countries then became part of the brain drain of emigration to the West. Meanwhile, in east Asia the focus of national education policy was on broad access to good-quality primary and secondary education, and industrialization and transition to a post-industrial economy in those countries was built on a base of broad masses of literate, numerate workers. And, as today's article reports, in the end east Asia ended up with more young people in higher education than in Africa anyhow, but along the way everyone became at least minimally well educated. For the same number of dollars, it probably does a country more good to improve primary education for the many than to broaden access to higher education for the few.

roymurdock 11y ago

> The more people have degrees, the more employers will insist on recruiting graduates. In many countries jobs such as teaching and nursing, which did not require a degree 30 years ago, are now reserved for graduates. When just a small elite went to university, plenty of decent jobs were available to those with only secondary schooling. That is no longer true. This is the most interesting part of the education puzzle to me. There is quite clearly an oversupply of people with degrees, both undergraduate and post-graduate, but the harsh reality is that you still need one due to credentialism, the shrinking number of "low-hanging fruit" problems, and, paradoxically, the increased supply of people with degrees. One solution from a hiring perspective is a DaaS (Degree as a Service) model such as HourlyNerd [1] or Gigster (YC15) [2] where you can hire well-pedigreed business and CS graduates as micro consultants or coders. But in the future the biggest change I expect to see is one in the hiring attitude. As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate. I expect brand names to decrease in value as businesses and decision makers increase prioritization on demonstrated ability (Github, portfolio of work) and cost to hire, which will generally be lower for less well-branded schools and alternative methods of education, such as apprenticeships and online education. That's just my gut feeling from personal observations. There's a good chance I'm 100% wrong and getting a branded education will be more important than ever due to the high number of candidates w/ degrees, and the increasing importance of connections and network. That seems to be they way SV is moving these days. [1] https://hourlynerd.com/ https://hourlynerd.com/ [2] http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/ http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/

pc86 11y ago
> As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the average graduate. We agree there, but doesn't the next sentence represent a fundamental shift in thinking? I would think it much more likely for businesses and managers (particularly HR) to simply shift their signalling from Bachelor's degrees to Master's degrees rather than from Bachelor's degrees to a context-sensitive review of your body of work. It's much easier to say "I have a Master's in CS from Stanford" than it is to say "Here's my GitHub portfolio, let's talk about a few of my projects." I'd much rather folks focus on what they've actually accomplished rather than the institution they happened to attend, but I don't see it happening, particularly from HR folks who are not technically inclined and are simply trying to get a pile of 500 resumes down to a dozen. And like you said with SV, in elite circles you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a job ad looking for someone from {Stanford|Harvard|MIT}.

throwaway999888 11y ago

While the authors are busy jerking themselves sore over American Exceptionalism, I'm still as alienated by the rampant focus on academic pedigree and class from Americans as I was when I first learned about it. In my corner of the world, most people have these considerations when they choose the school-route (or not) in life: - Tired of reading and writing? Get an education in some trade. - Want a specific job that requires higher education? Continue school and get good enough grades. - Don't know what you want to do? Choose one of the former based on your perceived abilities and preferences. While there is to a degree some academic inflation, as long as there are people who are more inspired by doing hands-on work instead of becoming a white collar worker, I think things will be OK. Oh, and not having a college or university degree is not looked down upon. At all. Only the no/low-skill jobs, with low pay, are actively avoided if people can avoid them. So we have more of the poorer immigrants ending up with those jobs.

umanwizard 11y ago
I really don't think class and pedigree mattering is an American thing. I suspect you made the common error of pointing out something good about one of the ultra highly developed European countries, noticing that it's not the case in the poorer and more unequal US, and inexplicably thinking the US is the outlier. Edit: just to expand on this, the problems with the US are a result of the complicated system of cultural, political, and institutional issues. There isn't a Dictator of America who can wake up tomorrow and decree that everyone will believe in some set of enlightened values. So whenever I hear "I can't believe Americans do/think/believe X, that's so silly!" from Europeans, I can't help but think it's no more helpful than "isn't it quaint that Syrians care so much about religion" or "why can't Jews and Palestineans just get along?"
- benbreen 11y ago
  The parent comment fails to rings true to me in the case of the three European countries I have experience with, the UK, France, and Portugal. All three are in many ways even more obsessed with class-based academic hierarchies. For instance, students of Portugal's oldest university (Universidade de Lisboa) regularly wear 18th century style robes and were almost universally considered to be snobby rich kids by the Portuguese people I talked to about it. Oxbridge and the ancient English public schools that feed into it (Eton, Harrow, etc) are even more pedigree-obsessed than their US equivalents. And by all first-hand accounts I've heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be filled with urban elites bound for government posts. Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world, it's just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal points for this global obsession.

lumberjack 11y ago

What a bunch of bollocks. There is no connection between countries trying to improve their research facilities and the privitisation of undergraduate education. The latter is just more profitable and goes along with the trend to privitise all state services which has been going on for a while.