10 ms·

Academia is not Broken. We are.

71 points by baguasquirrel 16y ago

hga 16y ago
I'm not too impressed. For now I'll leave it by just point out that there are only 4 top US CS schools, not 5 (in west to east order, Stanford, UCB, CMU, MIT).
- brent 16y ago
  What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries. Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    UIUC and Cornell are both historically strong. UW (Washington) and UCSD (San Diego) both seem like exceptional up and comers that are probably much better schools than historically ranked. With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.
    - hga 16y ago
      "[...] there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5." And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5 probably proves it. Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5 list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or so. My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make good judgments on the topic of this essay.
      - pw0ncakes 16y ago
        For law students and lawyers, there's a "top 14". This is because the USN&WR top 10 has varied over the years, but the USN&WR top 14 has been stable for practically forever. The same is true of 17, 18, and maybe a couple of other integers. So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14 in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self-perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending #14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school. I wish I were making this up. I'm not.
        hga 16y ago
        Hmmmm, all the talk about the I-95 Supreme Court would support what you're saying.
- joeyo 16y ago
  Unless you are proposing that CS schools are not linearly rankable or that being "top" is not a unitary quantity, then the only way that I can see that the set of top US CS schools has a cardinality of four is if you are defining that axiomatically.
  - hga 16y ago
    Please see the sub-thread above for a reply.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  The set of {good universities at which to study computer science as an undergraduate} is a partially ordered set.
ihodes 16y ago
This totally makes sense: education isn't job training. So maybe it's not for everyone, but for me it's a short time in my life where I can study Elementary Theory of Numbers alongside Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Genetics and Life Forms without worrying about paying the bills. Learning how to do a job isn't too hard. You learn on the job, anyway. This is true for computer scientists as much as it is for neurosurgeons (residencies). School builds a foundation, and hopefully increases your interest in learning. It has mine.
- bbgm 16y ago
  And how do you decide what job? I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that. Yet all the education I got has been instrumental in being able to adjust, evolve and assimilate new knowledge.
  - hga 16y ago
    While you make good points, it's probably a good idea to decide on and prepare for your first job. Stick to it for 2 years and you'll be in a much better position to change fields. Plus if you decide early you can then pay attention to make sure it's a good match for you.
  - jseliger 16y ago
    "I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that." I'm a grad student in English lit, and I tell my students that their wisest course of action is to study math and reading/writing. Those two skills are applicable to almost any other domain, make picking up other skills easier, and relatively few people really understand either.
    - alnayyir 16y ago
      3 Rs, reading (w)riting and (a)rithmetic. I've been a proponent of teaching that and rhetoric for a long time.
      - 16y ago
madmaze 16y ago
I agree 100 percent. The reason one gets an education is because you want to find out what interesting things there are. If everyone had the same education there would be no job competition. The problem with most of today's education systems is that everyone gets treated the same. I have found this out first hand, but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. To make this possible we had to pretend that it was a regularly scheduled class, otherwise the administration of the school would have never let me build robots, program IRC clients or play with rapid prototyping. I learned more about research and the way things worked in the two semesters i was with this teacher than i did in all of my other schooling.
- jgg 16y ago
  >but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some terrible fiction books. But I'm not bitter. (;
radioactive21 16y ago
Here is what I dont get. In the US we complain about higher education Academia yet millions of foreigners go to our schools. I saw a stat where the majority of Engineer graduates are foreigners in the US. They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and their country.
- patio11 16y ago
  This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology. They come to major in things which will reward, with nearly 100% certainty, a career immediately after leaving school which pays excellent wages by Chinese standards. (A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do anything else.) (Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in making things up.)
  - jacoblyles 16y ago
    That's a very unprogressive thing for you to say.
    - YuriNiyazov 16y ago
      I have a degree in both CS (making things) and Philosophy (making things up) and I completely agree with patio11's comment. Progressivism has nothing to do with it. Majoring in Art History (where there are 12 job openings a year) and then getting a job as a barista at the local coffee shop doesn't make you the bastion of progressivism.
      - jacoblyles 16y ago
        There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer. Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.
yequalsx 16y ago
The truly great innovations are done by people who are interested in a problem and want to solve it. Rarely is it done for money. It is in the best interest of society that the people who are creative and smart have an avenue to explore that creativity without too much risk. This means lowering the cost to higher education and constricting the amount of people who go to college. The best math grad students want to go to MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc. because that's where the other smart people are and the environment fosters development. If we lose this then it will be a long term disaster for the nation. The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.
alttab 16y ago
This! The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite unacademic. Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.
- jfornear 16y ago
  > From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Employers created this system... You can't blame your friends with A, B, and C on their resume for expecting to get that cushy 9-5 job when employers openly say they are looking to hire people with A, B, and C on their resume. For them, meeting this criteria is their top priority. There's nothing wrong with having different goals and values from yours. Have employers really hijacked the American educational system? I think this is how it always has been. Americans are very pragmatic. Education in America is very pragmatic. If you think college should focus more on academics for the sake of academics, you can have that experience too, but let's not cry about the system being broken. The entitlement problem lies simply in overcompetition for these cushy 9-5 jobs due to the relative ease of getting A, B, and C on one's resume over the past few years. Pair that with the downsizing, cutbacks, and layoffs of the financial crisis, and the economics just don't work in recent grads' favor at all. (Look at our unemployment rate...) I don't have a cushy 9-5 job, but my expectations aren't shattered at all. I didn't optimize my resume for A, B, and C because I enjoyed pursuing X, Y, and Z much more. I thought A, B, and C were mostly bullshit... I think employers are perfectly content with hiring bullshitters. > "Bullshitting is the most valuable skill to have." (unknown) I think it's just inconvenient that academia is mixed up with careerism. Neither group really cares much for the other, but unfortunately, the former is dependent on the latter. You can still choose your path and set realistic expectations though, and I think most people do this.
- nagrom 16y ago
  "From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters." If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-) Bullshitters are, as a class, the most successful people in history, I would guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...
fnid2 16y ago
There was a frontline episode last night on Education, Inc. (i think it was called) and I think it presents a dangerous trend -- though not for the reason Frontline said. Our country is broken. Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt. Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay off the loans. How could they decide something like that?? Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student. There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans people took out, but can't repay. People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make good decisions?? Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing. Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent for people like this? In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years ago. Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual accountability -- you lose individual freedom.
JustinSeriously 16y ago
I went to college because I loved computer science, but while there I was in class alongside many students (at least in the required courses) who were just there for a good job, and I never had a problem with any of them. In fact, college did pretty well for most of them. I've never been dissuaded from thinking that there is a place for people-who-just-want-good-jobs in colleges. There are plenty of opportunities for people who wanted to go further in computer science, I don't know of any college with a good computer science programs that's lacking in high level math and AI courses. That said, I absolutely agree with "The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken." People need to decide up front if their priority is a 9-5 job and plan accordingly.

71 points by baguasquirrel 16y ago

hga 16y ago

I'm not too impressed. For now I'll leave it by just point out that there are only 4 top US CS schools, not 5 (in west to east order, Stanford, UCB, CMU, MIT).

brent 16y ago
What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries. Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  UIUC and Cornell are both historically strong. UW (Washington) and UCSD (San Diego) both seem like exceptional up and comers that are probably much better schools than historically ranked. With that said, there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5.
  - hga 16y ago
    "[...] there's a pretty big dip from #4 to #5." And that is exactly my sub-point. The fact that no one can list a clear #5 probably proves it. Going further, it you agree with the above there's no sense in making a top 5 list, so replying to joeyo, it's not axiomatic in terms of cardinality. It only makes sense to list the top 4, and then something like the top dozen or so. My greater point is that someone who doesn't know this isn't likely to make good judgments on the topic of this essay.
    - pw0ncakes 16y ago
      For law students and lawyers, there's a "top 14". This is because the USN&WR top 10 has varied over the years, but the USN&WR top 14 has been stable for practically forever. The same is true of 17, 18, and maybe a couple of other integers. So "top 14" is the meaningful distinction due to this observed property of 14 in the rankings, which could be an artifact of chance. But it has become self-perpetuating at the prestige drop between #14 and #15 is enormous. Also, law as a profession cares obsessively about where one went to school. Attending #14 means you went to a "national law school"; #15 makes it very difficult for you to get a good job more than 200 miles from your law school. I wish I were making this up. I'm not.
      - hga 16y ago
        Hmmmm, all the talk about the I-95 Supreme Court would support what you're saying.
joeyo 16y ago
Unless you are proposing that CS schools are not linearly rankable or that being "top" is not a unitary quantity, then the only way that I can see that the set of top US CS schools has a cardinality of four is if you are defining that axiomatically.
- hga 16y ago
  Please see the sub-thread above for a reply.
tokenadult 16y ago
The set of {good universities at which to study computer science as an undergraduate} is a partially ordered set.

ihodes 16y ago

This totally makes sense: education isn't job training. So maybe it's not for everyone, but for me it's a short time in my life where I can study Elementary Theory of Numbers alongside Cognitive Neuroscience and Computational Genetics and Life Forms without worrying about paying the bills. Learning how to do a job isn't too hard. You learn on the job, anyway. This is true for computer scientists as much as it is for neurosurgeons (residencies). School builds a foundation, and hopefully increases your interest in learning. It has mine.

bbgm 16y ago
And how do you decide what job? I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that. Yet all the education I got has been instrumental in being able to adjust, evolve and assimilate new knowledge.
- hga 16y ago
  While you make good points, it's probably a good idea to decide on and prepare for your first job. Stick to it for 2 years and you'll be in a much better position to change fields. Plus if you decide early you can then pay attention to make sure it's a good match for you.
- jseliger 16y ago
  "I've changed jobs and fields so often, there is no way you can prepare for that." I'm a grad student in English lit, and I tell my students that their wisest course of action is to study math and reading/writing. Those two skills are applicable to almost any other domain, make picking up other skills easier, and relatively few people really understand either.
  - alnayyir 16y ago
    3 Rs, reading (w)riting and (a)rithmetic. I've been a proponent of teaching that and rhetoric for a long time.
    - 16y ago

madmaze 16y ago

I agree 100 percent. The reason one gets an education is because you want to find out what interesting things there are. If everyone had the same education there would be no job competition. The problem with most of today's education systems is that everyone gets treated the same. I have found this out first hand, but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. To make this possible we had to pretend that it was a regularly scheduled class, otherwise the administration of the school would have never let me build robots, program IRC clients or play with rapid prototyping. I learned more about research and the way things worked in the two semesters i was with this teacher than i did in all of my other schooling.

jgg 16y ago
>but i was lucky enough to have a high school computer and robotics teacher that let me explore things i found interesting for credit. You were lucky - the only thing that saved me from giving up entirely in high school were a few good books I found by browsing MIT's OpenCourseWare pages and other places. My high school was full of corrupt assholes who spent all the school's funding on elaborate sports complexes for our shitty sports sports teams, so that all the funding to our science, math and tech clubs dissolved and the library only had a few outdated dictionaries and some terrible fiction books. But I'm not bitter. (;

radioactive21 16y ago

Here is what I dont get. In the US we complain about higher education Academia yet millions of foreigners go to our schools. I saw a stat where the majority of Engineer graduates are foreigners in the US. They are using the very system that we complain about to benefit them and their country.

patio11 16y ago
This is largely because people don't come from China to major in Women's Studies, Philosophy, or Anthropology. They come to major in things which will reward, with nearly 100% certainty, a career immediately after leaving school which pays excellent wages by Chinese standards. (A very minor portion of the whinging about US academia is about degrees which formerly lead to very well-paying careers but have been coming under pricing pressure, such that they now merely are comfortably middle class. This is the case in many of the hard sciences. Most of the whinging comes from holders of degrees which prepare them fabulously to whinge and not so fabulously to do anything else.) (Full disclosure: I have a degree in making things and another degree in making things up.)
- jacoblyles 16y ago
  That's a very unprogressive thing for you to say.
  - YuriNiyazov 16y ago
    I have a degree in both CS (making things) and Philosophy (making things up) and I completely agree with patio11's comment. Progressivism has nothing to do with it. Majoring in Art History (where there are 12 job openings a year) and then getting a job as a barista at the local coffee shop doesn't make you the bastion of progressivism.
    - jacoblyles 16y ago
      There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer. Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.

yequalsx 16y ago

The truly great innovations are done by people who are interested in a problem and want to solve it. Rarely is it done for money. It is in the best interest of society that the people who are creative and smart have an avenue to explore that creativity without too much risk. This means lowering the cost to higher education and constricting the amount of people who go to college. The best math grad students want to go to MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc. because that's where the other smart people are and the environment fosters development. If we lose this then it will be a long term disaster for the nation. The goal needs to be to get universities back to allowing problem solvers solve problems and not become factories that churn out workers.

alttab 16y ago

This! The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken. It in essence is a laziness of the mind, an unwillingness to chart out one's own path, the very idea of which is quite unacademic. Totally spot on. I have friends with this exact mentality. From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Luckily nature has corrected itself for millions of years.

jfornear 16y ago
> From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters. Employers created this system... You can't blame your friends with A, B, and C on their resume for expecting to get that cushy 9-5 job when employers openly say they are looking to hire people with A, B, and C on their resume. For them, meeting this criteria is their top priority. There's nothing wrong with having different goals and values from yours. Have employers really hijacked the American educational system? I think this is how it always has been. Americans are very pragmatic. Education in America is very pragmatic. If you think college should focus more on academics for the sake of academics, you can have that experience too, but let's not cry about the system being broken. The entitlement problem lies simply in overcompetition for these cushy 9-5 jobs due to the relative ease of getting A, B, and C on one's resume over the past few years. Pair that with the downsizing, cutbacks, and layoffs of the financial crisis, and the economics just don't work in recent grads' favor at all. (Look at our unemployment rate...) I don't have a cushy 9-5 job, but my expectations aren't shattered at all. I didn't optimize my resume for A, B, and C because I enjoyed pursuing X, Y, and Z much more. I thought A, B, and C were mostly bullshit... I think employers are perfectly content with hiring bullshitters. > "Bullshitting is the most valuable skill to have." (unknown) I think it's just inconvenient that academia is mixed up with careerism. Neither group really cares much for the other, but unfortunately, the former is dependent on the latter. You can still choose your path and set realistic expectations though, and I think most people do this.
nagrom 16y ago
"From this crisis we face today - employers will recognize this fact and stop hiring bullshitters." If you are prepared to put money on that, I think that you may end up poor ;-) Bullshitters are, as a class, the most successful people in history, I would guess. Politicians, high-ranking clergy, business men, aristocracy, etc. would mostly fall under that umberella, and have managed out society since it started. The last 100 years or so have been the most meritocratic we've ever seen, and I would be surprised if we don't slide back a little soon...

fnid2 16y ago

There was a frontline episode last night on Education, Inc. (i think it was called) and I think it presents a dangerous trend -- though not for the reason Frontline said. Our country is broken. Many of the for profit institutions (like university of phoenix) are being sued because the people who got educations there aren't getting jobs, though they are still saddled with tens -- even hundreds -- of thousands of dollars in debt, much of it from Federal Loans. They can never escape this debt. Frontline basically argued that the colleges were accepting people into their institutions who wouldn't be able to get jobs that would enable them to pay off the loans. How could they decide something like that?? Whose responsibility is it to get a graduate a job? If a college graduate can't get a job, I believe it is largely the responsibility of the student. There are no guarantees in life and the dangerous trend we see is one where we are requiring companies to protect people from themselves. We are removing responsibility and accountability from individuals and putting it on corporations who sell them things. The same thing is happening with home loans people took out, but can't repay. People are being raised without the critical thinking skills needed to make good decisions and why should they? They aren't being held accountable for those decisions either -- the tax payer pays. And really, why shouldn't they default -- they get a free home, a free education. The derelicts are being rewarded! Why aren't we rewarding those who make good decisions?? Our society is broken, because parents are failing. Schools are failing. Greedy corporations are prospering. Whose fault is it? Is it the parents, the schools, and the individuals -- or the corporations? Is society to be a parent for people like this? In computer science, technology is changing so fast, it's almost impossible to teach kids what they need to know 4 years from now. Memristors? Cloud Computing? Mobile apps? NoSQL, who knows? My university didn't teach me anything at all about databases, but yet employers want universities to teach kids how to code in Ruby which didn't even exist when curricula were set years ago. Point is, it's a dangerous trend to absolve the individual of the responsibility to think for themselves. The U.S. was founded on individual freedom, but when you don't have individual responsibility and individual accountability -- you lose individual freedom.

JustinSeriously 16y ago

I went to college because I loved computer science, but while there I was in class alongside many students (at least in the required courses) who were just there for a good job, and I never had a problem with any of them. In fact, college did pretty well for most of them. I've never been dissuaded from thinking that there is a place for people-who-just-want-good-jobs in colleges. There are plenty of opportunities for people who wanted to go further in computer science, I don't know of any college with a good computer science programs that's lacking in high level math and AI courses. That said, I absolutely agree with "The entitlement of success that seems to follow from attending college is what's broken. The expectation that you will get a cushy 9-5 job in return for that diploma is what's broken." People need to decide up front if their priority is a 9-5 job and plan accordingly.