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You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking administ

You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. "The liberal education" is granfalloon pushed by a rent-seeking administrative and professorial class. When we outlawed IQ tests for employment, we became unable to train engineers and other high-IQ professions in house, as minds capable of doing these jobs are rare, companies need to pre-filter before investing resources. As universities are allowed to use such tests, we use education as a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, as we are outlawed from directly measuring these characteristics. Thus the education bubble. Thiel is offering alternatives, and rather charitably. Is offering alternatives an act of war?

GavinMcG 10y ago
> You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online. There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.
tensor 10y ago
No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO, managers, etc.
glup 10y ago
I think you're right that there is a sleight-of-hand in the modern higher educational system: given that most of the substantive knowledge is publicly available (e.g. I can download any textbook I want), they really offer something different than technical knowledge. I think that the real product is networks: if you attend a top university, you trade money to be placed with a bunch of very smart people with lots of social capital, and the credentials conferred upon graduation give you access to to other networks afterwards (professional, social, and more often than not, some hybrid of the two). Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.

GavinMcG 10y ago

> You need knowledge and smarts, one is given by your genetics the other is free online. That works for a certain kind of learner: people who are already good at breaking down a problem into constituent parts, who are driven enough to chase down the resources they need and to figure out how things fit together, and who want to learn about the topics that are most available online. There are a lot of other intelligent people who could do valuable things with an education, but who lack one or more of those characteristics.

tensor 10y ago

No one is threatened by Thiel. Annoyed, yes, but threatened no. Does anyone seriously think that these Thiel payed dropouts are going to be making breakthroughs in physics, engineering, medicine? No, of course not. They'll be in soft positions where their main skill is interacting with people. E.g. CEO, managers, etc.

glup 10y ago

I think you're right that there is a sleight-of-hand in the modern higher educational system: given that most of the substantive knowledge is publicly available (e.g. I can download any textbook I want), they really offer something different than technical knowledge. I think that the real product is networks: if you attend a top university, you trade money to be placed with a bunch of very smart people with lots of social capital, and the credentials conferred upon graduation give you access to to other networks afterwards (professional, social, and more often than not, some hybrid of the two). Where I disagree strongly with the above "granfalloon" critique of liberal education is that I think it's a side effect of bringing together people from geographically disperse regions and widely varying values and backgrounds and making them live and work together. Profs just offer a framework to think about it, especially relating it to a historical context.