7 ms·

I attended a university with a strong co-op program, and I personally believe it is the best possible solution. Classes were focused on theory and my three 6-mo

I attended a university with a strong co-op program, and I personally believe it is the best possible solution. Classes were focused on theory and my three 6-month co-ops were spent working on meaningful software projects at real companies. As a result, I was able to build up a solid background in Computer Science theory, didn't have to deal with the shortcomings of group class projects, and learned how to ship production-worthy code under the mentorship of real, senior engineers (and got paid to boot). Why more universities don't leverage co-op programs, especially given the exorbitant and rising cost of college tuition in the US, is beyond me.

djrobstep 9y ago
Because education as a system isn't designed for actually learning, it's designed for perpetuating a meaningless and arbitrary game of credentialism to justify the socio-economic hierarchy. And to babysit children so that their parents can spend more time participating in capitalism.
- mjburgess 9y ago
  I guess you're down-voted for both having a non-obvious opinion and phrasing it in a hostile way. You are correct however, but it's more understanable than you make out. Rather, the education system is designed to impart the skill of information recall -- which was essential to actually acquiring the target skills (ie., you needed to remember lots about chemistry before doing any). Remembering sentences about a skill has no relationship to being able to do it, only, that as you're learning to do it, those will be an aid. That hasnt been true for less than 20 years, perhaps 10 with the prevalence of smart phones in 2007. The whole system is set up to impart the skill of recall and grade according to your ability to recall. There is a implicit general awareness that you're actually not aquiring the target skills. eg., after 5-7 years of french in the UK, no 18 year old can speak french. And so on for every subject. The same is true all the way up until PhD. It's our historical model of what education was for: giving you the library up-front. The skills were to be obtained in employment, and with any self-motivated practice. Today that is painfully ridiculous, and there's really almost no value in it. Leaving the warehousing, grading and certifying functions of educational institutions their only apparent use. PS. There's an argument to say education hasn't needed to be this way since the advent of public libraries, cheap books, which is still late 20th C. This is plausible enough too. Our template of education is still basically a mix of medieval and Victorian, with the presumption that books are hard to obtain or difficult to survey oneself. note that primary/elementary schooling isnt set up this way: it is deliberately skilling. This makes it very effective and very important.
  - javajosh 9y ago
    School gives some a useful fiction, which is primary motivational. E.g. campus, classrooms, professors make you feel better about spending your time on some esoterica. The other benefit is subject gate keeping. Departments at least in STEM, don't offer pointless classes. An autodidact might not know what's valuable and might not always muster the energy to get through. They also might not have the integrity to give themselves a fair test. So yeah, school is useful beyond addressing the scarcity of books.
    - mjburgess 9y ago
      School is useful insofar as its guiding and motivating, yes. This is tutoring. Everything else it does is a waste of time. That's where you'll find most of the actual time spent though, and it is certainly not an educational aim. The aim is to grade on recall. It is not to motivate, or guide.
      - javajosh 9y ago
        >The aim is to grade on recall. No. At best this means you had a terrible experience, and are generalizing in ignorance. At worst you are dug into a position and are willing to defend it without integrity (a sadly popular and often successful approach). Many (most?) of my tests were open book and they were hard because they were puzzles requiring you to have absorbed the book to the extent that you could reason beyond it. The tests would probe our understanding of an idea by asserting a small change in the initial assumptions, and have us complete the derivation with that new assumption. Test questions were novel complications of the problems in the book. That was my experience, and it was a good one. I'm sorry you didn't get that.
        SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
        This is my current experience as well, open book open notes means be familiar enough with the concepts at play that when I ask you to do something fairly specific, you can reason out a series of commands/functions to get the job done.
- adamsea 9y ago
  Even for the people getting Phds in, say, mathematics? Or the undergrads studying mathematics en route to getting their Phd?
  - djrobstep 9y ago
    I am describing education as a system. Plenty of real learning happens within it, but this is not what the system is optimized for or what it depends on.
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    PhD is skilling in academic skills. Undergrad and most masters programs are still just going for information recall. This is why PhDs are specific, intensive, daily, guided, etc.These are all the characteristics of skill aquistion. Compare, say, with paino tuition. All skill acquisition is basically a form of apprentiship. PhDs are apprentice academics. Ask yourself the simple question: after finishing this education what skillful activities can I actually do? After primary education: reading, writing, remembering, etc. After secondary: basically the same. After tertiary: basically the same. After PhD: run a particular kind of experiment, analysis, etc. After 10 years in a programming team: solve professional programming problems. After 10 years with a piano tutor: play the piano. The question "what can I do?" seems always answered with: not much. This should be quite shocking, and today it is -- really, that is the correct answer. Your BSc amounts to "not much".
    - tjoff 9y ago
      The answer is that you've learned to learn. You got some breath of knowledge, not everything is relevant but it helps putting things in perspective. This is crucial. But the most important thing is that you've learned how to quickly adapt and pick up new things. This is what is valuable and in combination with a broad understanding is very much worth the education. It is okay if the understanding is shallow or even obsolete, point is you have the tools to recognize what you need to learn and you've learned how to quickly brush up on the relevant parts necessary to solve the problem at hand. What kind of answer did you expect? My BSc amounted to me being very proficient in framework X? That would have been a waste of time and that is also what often is the alternative to an education. People who self-learn are often very good at a specific tasks but have vast areas which for all intents and purposes is magic. Maybe lack of education is why everything has to be made in javascript today?
- adamzerner 9y ago
  I don't know why this is downvoted. I think that Bryan Caplan's book The Case against Education - Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html) makes a pretty strong argument to support the related points.
  - thomasahle 9y ago
    Most people on hacker news have (as far as I've noticed) very much enjoyed their university programs and will defend them quite vehemently. Often these programs were quite high quality, with lots of close contacts with TA's and professors. Further, for people who did theoretical CS or math programs, it can feel quite frustrated working in a field with so many "self-learned" people and find that these are often ignorant of what they don't know. Finally, many people here have Ph.D.'s or have worked in academia or teaching in various ways. This all results in people being somewhat skeptical of advice to "don't do school".
    - wcarss 9y ago
      On the flip side of this, many of the most capable and intelligent people I have worked with had no degree (or a non-CS one, e.g. fine art is particularly common), and when I try to think of times my algorithms, OS, networking, maths, or even data structures courses have been directly beneficial to my daily work, I have little to show. Those all had knock-on effects and have indirectly made me more capable and confident in my analyses of performance or occasionally in troubleshooting, but it is very rare that I spend a day doing something deeply theoretical, and it is conversely very common to spend days hitting my head against walls with configuration, integration, or versioning of build/deploy/test components and dependencies. My CS theory is no good there, only methodical troubleshooting and asking for help in IRC are effective, and anyone can learn that by doing.
    - 0x445442 9y ago
      Yeah, I'd agree with this. You see it play out in interviewing when the "academics" ask questions that are quite useless in determining whether or not someone is qualified to build a web app. It's as if interviewers are just stroking their own ego trying to recreate the relationships they encountered in academia only with the roles reversed.
ma2rten 9y ago
I don't know. I attended a regular computer science program and I am glad I did. The goal of university is not to prepare you as best as possible for working life, but to teach academic thinking. Class projects usually have a specific purpose, like teaching computer vision, operating systems or building compilers. You'll spend the rest of your life working. There is no need to rush into it, in my opinion. Then again, I didn't study in the US, so I didn't have the tuition problem.
- wcarss 9y ago
  For you, university was a means to the end of learning academic thinking. For me, it was a means to the end of attaining a decent job. There are certainly arguments to be made that university is by definition, in original intent, and in theory solely a vehicle for teaching academic thought, but I think the pragmatic counter to them is a poll of "why are you here?"[1] , and should be considered valid. The end result is that university is in practice not one or the other but both: it must teach some academic thought, and provide some job-readiness. I wish to digress for a moment into why that is not just a failing of many students to understand school's true purpose: many people (hi) do not come from a background where lifetime economic security is a guarantee, and while programming is a rare example (at least in North America) where if you spend the time, you can probably do it, and if you can do it, you can probably be paid well for it, there are unfortunately still gatekeepers. HR departments frequently resort to very base credentialism to sort through candidate resumés, and those with schooling typically come first and get higher base offers of compensation. Not to speak of the network social effects of spending years with other entrants into the field, and the opportunities for extra-curricular pursuits which also are well regarded by those gatekeepers. These among other things have forced many people with mere occupational goals to pursue university degrees. I wish it were not like this, because my professors universally did not feel that that was a good reason to be there, and occasionally avoided very useful practical topics on principle, but I (and many within my cohort) felt there was no better alternative for a successful outcome in life, and it has mostly worked out. 1 - I of course have not conducted this poll, but I do strongly believe that at least a plurality would respond with job-attainment as their primary goal, and would not be surprised by an even greater response.
diehell 9y ago
How does a strong co-op program work, and why do you think it's the best? Am from SEA university programs and I don't believe we have any of those. Would be awesome to understand more about the process.
- wcarss 9y ago
  Typically a student must maintain good academic standing and apply specifically to a co-op program to attend, and then an administrative department within the school will run a class on interviewing skills and resumé-building, before helping to coordinate a matching process between students and participating companies for work terms. In many cases, large companies have special days where they'll come onto campuses to do interviews, and they may take a significant cohort of students each semester. There are often rules like, "you have 24 hours to respond to an offer and may only reject one offer" to ensure good faith been parties and high match percentages when some companies may be more prestigious or slow in their process. Students then spend 3-16 months (this depends on the school's academic timing and the company's own structure -- 4 months in summer is most common) at a company and if it's a good company, they'll be given real work, strong mentorship, and deep integration into a team, and often students near graduation will get offers of employment directly at the end of their term. There are also usually very tedious written work-term reports to fill out as a bureaucratically useful artifact of the process. They're typically expository essays of topics like "what I learned at $company", and everyone hates them. Students will have 1-4 (usually 3) terms out in the real world over the course of their time in school, and graduate with meaningful practical skills and usually a taste of what's available to help assess opportunities. It's on the whole a great system for a lot of people, particularly those who are using university to increase their employability.

djrobstep 9y ago

Because education as a system isn't designed for actually learning, it's designed for perpetuating a meaningless and arbitrary game of credentialism to justify the socio-economic hierarchy. And to babysit children so that their parents can spend more time participating in capitalism.

mjburgess 9y ago
I guess you're down-voted for both having a non-obvious opinion and phrasing it in a hostile way. You are correct however, but it's more understanable than you make out. Rather, the education system is designed to impart the skill of information recall -- which was essential to actually acquiring the target skills (ie., you needed to remember lots about chemistry before doing any). Remembering sentences about a skill has no relationship to being able to do it, only, that as you're learning to do it, those will be an aid. That hasnt been true for less than 20 years, perhaps 10 with the prevalence of smart phones in 2007. The whole system is set up to impart the skill of recall and grade according to your ability to recall. There is a implicit general awareness that you're actually not aquiring the target skills. eg., after 5-7 years of french in the UK, no 18 year old can speak french. And so on for every subject. The same is true all the way up until PhD. It's our historical model of what education was for: giving you the library up-front. The skills were to be obtained in employment, and with any self-motivated practice. Today that is painfully ridiculous, and there's really almost no value in it. Leaving the warehousing, grading and certifying functions of educational institutions their only apparent use. PS. There's an argument to say education hasn't needed to be this way since the advent of public libraries, cheap books, which is still late 20th C. This is plausible enough too. Our template of education is still basically a mix of medieval and Victorian, with the presumption that books are hard to obtain or difficult to survey oneself. note that primary/elementary schooling isnt set up this way: it is deliberately skilling. This makes it very effective and very important.
- javajosh 9y ago
  School gives some a useful fiction, which is primary motivational. E.g. campus, classrooms, professors make you feel better about spending your time on some esoterica. The other benefit is subject gate keeping. Departments at least in STEM, don't offer pointless classes. An autodidact might not know what's valuable and might not always muster the energy to get through. They also might not have the integrity to give themselves a fair test. So yeah, school is useful beyond addressing the scarcity of books.
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    School is useful insofar as its guiding and motivating, yes. This is tutoring. Everything else it does is a waste of time. That's where you'll find most of the actual time spent though, and it is certainly not an educational aim. The aim is to grade on recall. It is not to motivate, or guide.
    - javajosh 9y ago
      >The aim is to grade on recall. No. At best this means you had a terrible experience, and are generalizing in ignorance. At worst you are dug into a position and are willing to defend it without integrity (a sadly popular and often successful approach). Many (most?) of my tests were open book and they were hard because they were puzzles requiring you to have absorbed the book to the extent that you could reason beyond it. The tests would probe our understanding of an idea by asserting a small change in the initial assumptions, and have us complete the derivation with that new assumption. Test questions were novel complications of the problems in the book. That was my experience, and it was a good one. I'm sorry you didn't get that.
      - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
        This is my current experience as well, open book open notes means be familiar enough with the concepts at play that when I ask you to do something fairly specific, you can reason out a series of commands/functions to get the job done.
adamsea 9y ago
Even for the people getting Phds in, say, mathematics? Or the undergrads studying mathematics en route to getting their Phd?
- djrobstep 9y ago
  I am describing education as a system. Plenty of real learning happens within it, but this is not what the system is optimized for or what it depends on.
- mjburgess 9y ago
  PhD is skilling in academic skills. Undergrad and most masters programs are still just going for information recall. This is why PhDs are specific, intensive, daily, guided, etc.These are all the characteristics of skill aquistion. Compare, say, with paino tuition. All skill acquisition is basically a form of apprentiship. PhDs are apprentice academics. Ask yourself the simple question: after finishing this education what skillful activities can I actually do? After primary education: reading, writing, remembering, etc. After secondary: basically the same. After tertiary: basically the same. After PhD: run a particular kind of experiment, analysis, etc. After 10 years in a programming team: solve professional programming problems. After 10 years with a piano tutor: play the piano. The question "what can I do?" seems always answered with: not much. This should be quite shocking, and today it is -- really, that is the correct answer. Your BSc amounts to "not much".
  - tjoff 9y ago
    The answer is that you've learned to learn. You got some breath of knowledge, not everything is relevant but it helps putting things in perspective. This is crucial. But the most important thing is that you've learned how to quickly adapt and pick up new things. This is what is valuable and in combination with a broad understanding is very much worth the education. It is okay if the understanding is shallow or even obsolete, point is you have the tools to recognize what you need to learn and you've learned how to quickly brush up on the relevant parts necessary to solve the problem at hand. What kind of answer did you expect? My BSc amounted to me being very proficient in framework X? That would have been a waste of time and that is also what often is the alternative to an education. People who self-learn are often very good at a specific tasks but have vast areas which for all intents and purposes is magic. Maybe lack of education is why everything has to be made in javascript today?
adamzerner 9y ago
I don't know why this is downvoted. I think that Bryan Caplan's book The Case against Education - Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html) makes a pretty strong argument to support the related points.
- thomasahle 9y ago
  Most people on hacker news have (as far as I've noticed) very much enjoyed their university programs and will defend them quite vehemently. Often these programs were quite high quality, with lots of close contacts with TA's and professors. Further, for people who did theoretical CS or math programs, it can feel quite frustrated working in a field with so many "self-learned" people and find that these are often ignorant of what they don't know. Finally, many people here have Ph.D.'s or have worked in academia or teaching in various ways. This all results in people being somewhat skeptical of advice to "don't do school".
  - wcarss 9y ago
    On the flip side of this, many of the most capable and intelligent people I have worked with had no degree (or a non-CS one, e.g. fine art is particularly common), and when I try to think of times my algorithms, OS, networking, maths, or even data structures courses have been directly beneficial to my daily work, I have little to show. Those all had knock-on effects and have indirectly made me more capable and confident in my analyses of performance or occasionally in troubleshooting, but it is very rare that I spend a day doing something deeply theoretical, and it is conversely very common to spend days hitting my head against walls with configuration, integration, or versioning of build/deploy/test components and dependencies. My CS theory is no good there, only methodical troubleshooting and asking for help in IRC are effective, and anyone can learn that by doing.
  - 0x445442 9y ago
    Yeah, I'd agree with this. You see it play out in interviewing when the "academics" ask questions that are quite useless in determining whether or not someone is qualified to build a web app. It's as if interviewers are just stroking their own ego trying to recreate the relationships they encountered in academia only with the roles reversed.

ma2rten 9y ago

I don't know. I attended a regular computer science program and I am glad I did. The goal of university is not to prepare you as best as possible for working life, but to teach academic thinking. Class projects usually have a specific purpose, like teaching computer vision, operating systems or building compilers. You'll spend the rest of your life working. There is no need to rush into it, in my opinion. Then again, I didn't study in the US, so I didn't have the tuition problem.

wcarss 9y ago
For you, university was a means to the end of learning academic thinking. For me, it was a means to the end of attaining a decent job. There are certainly arguments to be made that university is by definition, in original intent, and in theory solely a vehicle for teaching academic thought, but I think the pragmatic counter to them is a poll of "why are you here?"[1] , and should be considered valid. The end result is that university is in practice not one or the other but both: it must teach some academic thought, and provide some job-readiness. I wish to digress for a moment into why that is not just a failing of many students to understand school's true purpose: many people (hi) do not come from a background where lifetime economic security is a guarantee, and while programming is a rare example (at least in North America) where if you spend the time, you can probably do it, and if you can do it, you can probably be paid well for it, there are unfortunately still gatekeepers. HR departments frequently resort to very base credentialism to sort through candidate resumés, and those with schooling typically come first and get higher base offers of compensation. Not to speak of the network social effects of spending years with other entrants into the field, and the opportunities for extra-curricular pursuits which also are well regarded by those gatekeepers. These among other things have forced many people with mere occupational goals to pursue university degrees. I wish it were not like this, because my professors universally did not feel that that was a good reason to be there, and occasionally avoided very useful practical topics on principle, but I (and many within my cohort) felt there was no better alternative for a successful outcome in life, and it has mostly worked out. 1 - I of course have not conducted this poll, but I do strongly believe that at least a plurality would respond with job-attainment as their primary goal, and would not be surprised by an even greater response.

diehell 9y ago

How does a strong co-op program work, and why do you think it's the best? Am from SEA university programs and I don't believe we have any of those. Would be awesome to understand more about the process.

wcarss 9y ago
Typically a student must maintain good academic standing and apply specifically to a co-op program to attend, and then an administrative department within the school will run a class on interviewing skills and resumé-building, before helping to coordinate a matching process between students and participating companies for work terms. In many cases, large companies have special days where they'll come onto campuses to do interviews, and they may take a significant cohort of students each semester. There are often rules like, "you have 24 hours to respond to an offer and may only reject one offer" to ensure good faith been parties and high match percentages when some companies may be more prestigious or slow in their process. Students then spend 3-16 months (this depends on the school's academic timing and the company's own structure -- 4 months in summer is most common) at a company and if it's a good company, they'll be given real work, strong mentorship, and deep integration into a team, and often students near graduation will get offers of employment directly at the end of their term. There are also usually very tedious written work-term reports to fill out as a bureaucratically useful artifact of the process. They're typically expository essays of topics like "what I learned at $company", and everyone hates them. Students will have 1-4 (usually 3) terms out in the real world over the course of their time in school, and graduate with meaningful practical skills and usually a taste of what's available to help assess opportunities. It's on the whole a great system for a lot of people, particularly those who are using university to increase their employability.