6 ms·

"DIY U": The End of University Prestige

18 points by dwynings 17y ago

greenlblue 17y ago
Meh, there was a lot of vague stuff about improvement and empowering the learner but very little in the way of implementation. Currently the accreditation bodies are the biggest hurdles to overcome because anyone that wants to do anything innovative in education either has to be attached to a big name university or has to face the problem of overcoming a lot of red tape. Most accreditation bodies serve the interests of big name universities so anything that deviates from that model is met with suspicion and disdain. Speaking from personal experience I wouldn't have missed anything if I had skipped the entire high school and college experience because I learned absolutely nothing in classes. All of my current knowledge was gained by either working closely with a mentor or spending time at the library.
- evanrmurphy 17y ago
  Did you use the library mostly for their books or internet?
  - greenlblue 17y ago
    Books, since I was interested in non-technical fields as well and even though there has been a lot of progress in presentation methods most knowledge in non-technical fields is still only accessible from books.
- evanrmurphy 17y ago
  Currently the accreditation bodies are the biggest hurdles to overcome because anyone that wants to do anything innovative in education either has to be attached to a big name university or has to face the problem of overcoming a lot of red tape. Most accreditation bodies serve the interests of big name universities so anything that deviates from that model is met with suspicion and disdain. I think it will be market-driven. As the value of credentials relative to demonstrable skill continues to decrease, people will reconsider the proposition of taking on huge debt for a college degree. They'll look for alternative ways to acquire skills, and universities will have to compete by lowering tuition rates and rethinking education. Otherwise they won't attract enough tuition-paying students to cover operation costs. When it comes to the bottom line then administrations will mobilize. I predict that some universities will make interesting changes (eventually) and many will fail. Just hoping none are "too big to fail".
  - greenlblue 17y ago
    This has been happening for at least the past 10 years and there has been very little change. There is a lot of pressure and monetary incentive in keeping things the way they are. I'll give you an example. Many lower division math classes are offered by the math department because they are service classes with hefty per unit price tags and ridiculous book prices, i.e. other departments use those classes as a screening procedure and the math department gets a whole bunch of money to invite speakers and support incoming graduate students and the book store gets proceeds from old book resale. So as long as there is at least one department out there that is not feeling the crunch the math department will not do anything differently and there is always at least one technical department that does well no matter how good or bad the economy is. So from the other department's perspective it is a good idea to offload as much of the screening of students to the math department as possible since who really wants to spend time with undergrads when there are multimillion dollar grant proposals to submit to bring in money. From the math department's perspective it is a good idea to offer as many variations of the same course adapted to different departments as possible and from the book store's perspective it is a good idea to keep reselling old books at high prices. You tell me which one is going to innovate and get the others to go along with them. Each will cling to their old ways for as long as possible because honestly there is no real competition. The only way to get a piece of paper with B.S. and your name on it is to go to a big name accredited university. Long reply because I've been thinking about this problem for a long time now and I don't see any real way to force research oriented universities to innovate. There is no real incentive for innovation.
    - evanrmurphy 17y ago
      The only way to get a piece of paper with B.S. and your name on it is to go to a big name accredited university. But having the piece of paper is starting to matter less [1]. Most people want a degree so they can get a better job, but who would you rather hire as a developer: someone who spent 4 years getting decent grades and a CS degree, or someone who spent 4 years contributing to open source projects and teaching themselves to hack? Of course some employers would choose the former, but a smart one would at least strongly consider the latter. What does this mean for families? Many will undoubtedly continue supporting the institutions, but others may question the merit of spending years saving for and paying off debt from college when there are alternatives available. It's easy to imagine cheaper ways to work with mentors and spend time at the library, after all. :) [1] Trends would suggest that the paper actually matters more now than ever, due to degree inflation, but I think this will prove itself to be a bubble.
- ippisl 17y ago
  Regarding accreditation: there's accreditation for distance education in the department of education. the online learning institutions also have their own body of accreditation. But this doesn't give a strong brand like leading universities have.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Lewisham 17y ago
The problem with this approach is the belief that the university is a place to train undergraduates. Having worked as a staff member, and then jumped to graduate studies, I realized that actually, the modern university is a place of research. The undergraduate bit is simply to pay the bills. The university system's mission to disseminate information to the populace is almost entirely from the research, not the undergraduate teaching. It's not surprising they are inflexible. The reason the UK has more entry methods is because there are far fewer universities than in the US. Having moved to California from the UK when I was 24, CA has far more "universities" that specialize in teaching. The State school and Community College system doesn't exist in the UK... that's why there are all the internships. Finally, the author seems to assign all value in a university from what you learned in lectures. That's a flawed premise: the lectures are there to spur you on to learn outside of contact time. Developing all those skills, meeting all those like minded people, having an ecosystem where you can work on the student newspaper to get more skills... those are things that distributed learning doesn't offer. University != undergraduate lectures.
- nzmsv 17y ago
  University != undergraduate lectures. And that's exactly the problem. Why pay to attend an institution that does not care about your studies? There are a few profs who really care about the students. The rest just watch for the select few that can succeed in spite of the system, and pick them for grad school.
  - endtime 17y ago
    >Why pay to attend an institution that does not care about your studies? Because you're paying for environment, education, peer group, opportunity, and credibility...not hugs.
rflrob 17y ago
I haven't seen any evidence that Big Name universities are going to lose their prestige any time soon (a point which is actually not addressed much in the article). When I tell people what Top-Ranked college I went to, the immediate response 4 times out of 5 is something like, "wow, you must be really smart!" However, I think if the average "intelligence" (however you want to define that) is higher than the population at large, it's more that the lower ~30-50% of the intelligence spectrum is severely underrepresented, and the upper 1% is maybe twice as common as you'd expect. There's still plenty of people with normal talents. All of which is to say that the prestige of my undergraduate education far outweighs what it might actually be worth. While there might be a significant cultural shift, I frankly think that the cultural bias is too ingrained to change radically any time soon. What I think is likely to happen is that self-designed courses of study are more likely to become perfectly acceptable alternatives, rather than something stigmatized as weird.
metamemetics 17y ago
Prestigious universities were never about quality of education: if you're smart enough to get in, you're smart enough to teach yourself anything. Rather, they are about the peers you go to school with. You learn and grow from the type of people you surround yourself with, and at elite universities you surround yourself with extraordinarily smart people.
- timthorn 17y ago
  I think it's also about the quality of academic staff. At the best universities the teaching is usually a secondary activity; the lecturers are leaders in their field of research and can set a curriculum that a self learner would have difficulty in coming up with. But the actual learning is indeed often driven by the students.
  - greenlblue 17y ago
    Disagree with you on that one as well. Every postdoc in the math department tells the same story. Go to the library, find something that interests you, spend every waking moment with the subject, find an advisor, write a thesis. Nowhere in any of their stories do they mention going to class designed by world class researchers and learning from lectures.
    - endtime 17y ago
      It may not be true for math...but math is probably the exception rather than the rule. I'd certainly say timthorn is correct about CS.
- greenlblue 17y ago
  I disagree with you there. There are extraordinarily smart people in every aspect of life and in every university so paying for the privilege of surrounding yourself with smart people is a really poor way to spend your money since you can find them for free.
  - endtime 17y ago
silversmith 17y ago
I find the whole trend of online studying quite disturbing. From what I've seen, it defines studying as sitting in awe and trying to soak up the knowledge flowing from professors, and strives to replace it with possibly more efficient channels and call it the next best thing. All the while completely ignoring the second, in my opinion equally important, part of studying - peer to peer socialization. For me, the people I got to know during studies, and cemented the relationship during various activities not directly related to my field of studies, have proved to be of more value than the lectures attended. Aside from few basic courses that lay the groundwork, my CS studies have been repeated exercise in rapidly getting to know a field enough not to appear incompetent and pass the tests. Granted, this has helped me to the point where I can quickly find solid ground to stand on when thrown in a new technological field, but still, in the last year of my studies, I am working with technologies that have been at best mentioned in couple slides in somewhat related lectures, following methodology that has had been only passingly referenced. The field moves so fast, that by the time someone has developed a good course material on something, it's already yesterdays news. Technologies come and go, but the dude you that woke you the next day after a wild party because a test would be starting in half hour, he will last. And you can't replace that experience with Facebook or Second Life.
- evanrmurphy 17y ago
  I find the whole trend of online studying quite disturbing. From what I've seen, it defines studying as sitting in awe and trying to soak up the knowledge flowing from professors, and strives to replace it with possibly more efficient channels and call it the next best thing. All the while completely ignoring the second, in my opinion equally important, part of studying - peer to peer socialization. It's just an immature paradigm still. Obviously the web has proven itself to be an outstanding medium for peer-to-peer socialization, and it's only a matter of time before online education taps into this.
balding_n_tired 17y ago
I wonder. It would be interesting to see the undergraduate degrees of all the Salon staff. I

18 points by dwynings 17y ago

Meh, there was a lot of vague stuff about improvement and empowering the learner but very little in the way of implementation. Currently the accreditation bodies are the biggest hurdles to overcome because anyone that wants to do anything innovative in education either has to be attached to a big name university or has to face the problem of overcoming a lot of red tape. Most accreditation bodies serve the interests of big name universities so anything that deviates from that model is met with suspicion and disdain. Speaking from personal experience I wouldn't have missed anything if I had skipped the entire high school and college experience because I learned absolutely nothing in classes. All of my current knowledge was gained by either working closely with a mentor or spending time at the library.

evanrmurphy 17y ago
Did you use the library mostly for their books or internet?
- greenlblue 17y ago
  Books, since I was interested in non-technical fields as well and even though there has been a lot of progress in presentation methods most knowledge in non-technical fields is still only accessible from books.
evanrmurphy 17y ago
Currently the accreditation bodies are the biggest hurdles to overcome because anyone that wants to do anything innovative in education either has to be attached to a big name university or has to face the problem of overcoming a lot of red tape. Most accreditation bodies serve the interests of big name universities so anything that deviates from that model is met with suspicion and disdain. I think it will be market-driven. As the value of credentials relative to demonstrable skill continues to decrease, people will reconsider the proposition of taking on huge debt for a college degree. They'll look for alternative ways to acquire skills, and universities will have to compete by lowering tuition rates and rethinking education. Otherwise they won't attract enough tuition-paying students to cover operation costs. When it comes to the bottom line then administrations will mobilize. I predict that some universities will make interesting changes (eventually) and many will fail. Just hoping none are "too big to fail".
- greenlblue 17y ago
  This has been happening for at least the past 10 years and there has been very little change. There is a lot of pressure and monetary incentive in keeping things the way they are. I'll give you an example. Many lower division math classes are offered by the math department because they are service classes with hefty per unit price tags and ridiculous book prices, i.e. other departments use those classes as a screening procedure and the math department gets a whole bunch of money to invite speakers and support incoming graduate students and the book store gets proceeds from old book resale. So as long as there is at least one department out there that is not feeling the crunch the math department will not do anything differently and there is always at least one technical department that does well no matter how good or bad the economy is. So from the other department's perspective it is a good idea to offload as much of the screening of students to the math department as possible since who really wants to spend time with undergrads when there are multimillion dollar grant proposals to submit to bring in money. From the math department's perspective it is a good idea to offer as many variations of the same course adapted to different departments as possible and from the book store's perspective it is a good idea to keep reselling old books at high prices. You tell me which one is going to innovate and get the others to go along with them. Each will cling to their old ways for as long as possible because honestly there is no real competition. The only way to get a piece of paper with B.S. and your name on it is to go to a big name accredited university. Long reply because I've been thinking about this problem for a long time now and I don't see any real way to force research oriented universities to innovate. There is no real incentive for innovation.
  - evanrmurphy 17y ago
    The only way to get a piece of paper with B.S. and your name on it is to go to a big name accredited university. But having the piece of paper is starting to matter less [1]. Most people want a degree so they can get a better job, but who would you rather hire as a developer: someone who spent 4 years getting decent grades and a CS degree, or someone who spent 4 years contributing to open source projects and teaching themselves to hack? Of course some employers would choose the former, but a smart one would at least strongly consider the latter. What does this mean for families? Many will undoubtedly continue supporting the institutions, but others may question the merit of spending years saving for and paying off debt from college when there are alternatives available. It's easy to imagine cheaper ways to work with mentors and spend time at the library, after all. :) [1] Trends would suggest that the paper actually matters more now than ever, due to degree inflation, but I think this will prove itself to be a bubble.
ippisl 17y ago
Regarding accreditation: there's accreditation for distance education in the department of education. the online learning institutions also have their own body of accreditation. But this doesn't give a strong brand like leading universities have.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Lewisham 17y ago

The problem with this approach is the belief that the university is a place to train undergraduates. Having worked as a staff member, and then jumped to graduate studies, I realized that actually, the modern university is a place of research. The undergraduate bit is simply to pay the bills. The university system's mission to disseminate information to the populace is almost entirely from the research, not the undergraduate teaching. It's not surprising they are inflexible. The reason the UK has more entry methods is because there are far fewer universities than in the US. Having moved to California from the UK when I was 24, CA has far more "universities" that specialize in teaching. The State school and Community College system doesn't exist in the UK... that's why there are all the internships. Finally, the author seems to assign all value in a university from what you learned in lectures. That's a flawed premise: the lectures are there to spur you on to learn outside of contact time. Developing all those skills, meeting all those like minded people, having an ecosystem where you can work on the student newspaper to get more skills... those are things that distributed learning doesn't offer. University != undergraduate lectures.

nzmsv 17y ago
University != undergraduate lectures. And that's exactly the problem. Why pay to attend an institution that does not care about your studies? There are a few profs who really care about the students. The rest just watch for the select few that can succeed in spite of the system, and pick them for grad school.
- endtime 17y ago
  >Why pay to attend an institution that does not care about your studies? Because you're paying for environment, education, peer group, opportunity, and credibility...not hugs.

rflrob 17y ago

I haven't seen any evidence that Big Name universities are going to lose their prestige any time soon (a point which is actually not addressed much in the article). When I tell people what Top-Ranked college I went to, the immediate response 4 times out of 5 is something like, "wow, you must be really smart!" However, I think if the average "intelligence" (however you want to define that) is higher than the population at large, it's more that the lower ~30-50% of the intelligence spectrum is severely underrepresented, and the upper 1% is maybe twice as common as you'd expect. There's still plenty of people with normal talents. All of which is to say that the prestige of my undergraduate education far outweighs what it might actually be worth. While there might be a significant cultural shift, I frankly think that the cultural bias is too ingrained to change radically any time soon. What I think is likely to happen is that self-designed courses of study are more likely to become perfectly acceptable alternatives, rather than something stigmatized as weird.

metamemetics 17y ago

Prestigious universities were never about quality of education: if you're smart enough to get in, you're smart enough to teach yourself anything. Rather, they are about the peers you go to school with. You learn and grow from the type of people you surround yourself with, and at elite universities you surround yourself with extraordinarily smart people.

timthorn 17y ago
I think it's also about the quality of academic staff. At the best universities the teaching is usually a secondary activity; the lecturers are leaders in their field of research and can set a curriculum that a self learner would have difficulty in coming up with. But the actual learning is indeed often driven by the students.
- greenlblue 17y ago
  Disagree with you on that one as well. Every postdoc in the math department tells the same story. Go to the library, find something that interests you, spend every waking moment with the subject, find an advisor, write a thesis. Nowhere in any of their stories do they mention going to class designed by world class researchers and learning from lectures.
  - endtime 17y ago
    It may not be true for math...but math is probably the exception rather than the rule. I'd certainly say timthorn is correct about CS.
greenlblue 17y ago
I disagree with you there. There are extraordinarily smart people in every aspect of life and in every university so paying for the privilege of surrounding yourself with smart people is a really poor way to spend your money since you can find them for free.
- endtime 17y ago

silversmith 17y ago

I find the whole trend of online studying quite disturbing. From what I've seen, it defines studying as sitting in awe and trying to soak up the knowledge flowing from professors, and strives to replace it with possibly more efficient channels and call it the next best thing. All the while completely ignoring the second, in my opinion equally important, part of studying - peer to peer socialization. For me, the people I got to know during studies, and cemented the relationship during various activities not directly related to my field of studies, have proved to be of more value than the lectures attended. Aside from few basic courses that lay the groundwork, my CS studies have been repeated exercise in rapidly getting to know a field enough not to appear incompetent and pass the tests. Granted, this has helped me to the point where I can quickly find solid ground to stand on when thrown in a new technological field, but still, in the last year of my studies, I am working with technologies that have been at best mentioned in couple slides in somewhat related lectures, following methodology that has had been only passingly referenced. The field moves so fast, that by the time someone has developed a good course material on something, it's already yesterdays news. Technologies come and go, but the dude you that woke you the next day after a wild party because a test would be starting in half hour, he will last. And you can't replace that experience with Facebook or Second Life.

evanrmurphy 17y ago
I find the whole trend of online studying quite disturbing. From what I've seen, it defines studying as sitting in awe and trying to soak up the knowledge flowing from professors, and strives to replace it with possibly more efficient channels and call it the next best thing. All the while completely ignoring the second, in my opinion equally important, part of studying - peer to peer socialization. It's just an immature paradigm still. Obviously the web has proven itself to be an outstanding medium for peer-to-peer socialization, and it's only a matter of time before online education taps into this.

balding_n_tired 17y ago

I wonder. It would be interesting to see the undergraduate degrees of all the Salon staff. I