18 ms·

Surprising Things About School

277 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

cardamomo 9y ago
As a museum educator turned classroom teacher, this resonates with me. Readings that may be relevant to those who find this Twitter thread intriguing: - "On the Wildness of Children," on what kind of educational experiences we might imagine for our children if we consider what children are like first: http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/ http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/ - "Deschooling Society" (on my reading list): https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety
- baursak 9y ago
  You should also check out "Free to Learn" and "Free at Last" books, and Sudbury school model. As a parent, it's something I've been contemplating a lot, but haven't quite committed to yet.
triplesec 9y ago
Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."
- icebraining 9y ago
  It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    You're describing one of the other points he makes in this: as bad as you think for profit education is, it's worse. Austen has been railing against places like University of Phoenix, etc for a while as what's been discovered about them is just nuts. The stat that stood out for me was that at one point they had a substantial number of recruiters (thousands) but exactly zero job placement staff.
  - kthejoker2 9y ago
    The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds. That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      OP here. We are a school that is completely free and takes a percentage of income (though for two years, not for life). Even still the $400 to make it through the last month was a barrier. We’re working on having a fund available for living expenses, but “I’m going to pay you cash so you can go to school” is a different risk profile than “This School is free until you’re hired.”
      - kthejoker2 9y ago
        That's awesome. The only reason the school should take the burden is to distribute the risk pool and also theyre the most capable of providing some value framework on whether this $400 or that $400 is a better investment. I personally would loan money for this sort of thing if there was a reasonable ROI and someone vetting the students.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    Lenders aren’t very good at quantifying future changes in income. They’re trying, but it’s a hard problem to solve.
- bane 9y ago
  I don't think it's that surprising. Anecdote: Right after I barely graduated from High School after my family clawed its way out of homelessness, I spent a few years working minimum wage jobs with long commutes in an old car. I could barely afford gas and groceries let alone decent housing and college. After about 3 years of work, I managed to scrape together just enough to enroll in my local community college for two semesters, one class per semester. Total cost? At that time about $400 including books. And that $400 could have vaporized with one flat tire, or one visit to the doctor. An acquaintance of my parents heard that I was going to college, suddenly took an interest and hired me sight unseen to come work at his startup in an entry-level developer job at 3x my then current pay. I worked there for a couple years and when I was close to finishing college, another acquaintance hired me and doubled my pay. After that I was attached to a growing career and haven't looked back. But it all started with getting that tiny little bit of money together.
  - mcherm 9y ago
    It is incredibly surprising. You aren't surprised because you have experienced this. But any economist would look at this and say something like this: > You claim that there are people where an investment of $400 would > quickly (within a couple of years) give them a salary increase in > the range of $20,000 to $50,000 per year. That is obviously untrue. > If it WERE true, then at lease ONE person in the country would have > spent $4,000 to seed a 10-person program which granted the $400 in > exchange for a promise to contribute $8,000 back in a couple of > years. A x20 replication factor would easily swamp administrative > costs and participants who refuse to pay afterward and the program > would still be growing exponentially. I think the source of the fallacy is that while there ARE people for whom $400 is a difficult-to-surmount barrier beyond which no other major impediments stand between them and middle-class success, they are an impossible-to-find minority in a sea of people who are willing to ASK for $400 and those for whom $400 is a major impediment, but further impediments would prevent them from succeeding. Alternately, we can look at the literally thousands of charities (including schools themselves) that offer merit-based and need-based scholarships, and conclude that the economist is partly right and the system DOES exist, but isn't meeting all of the need.
- twblalock 9y ago
  Why couldn't that student take out a student loan, like most students?
mattmanser 9y ago
In the UK at least, 2 isn't true, loads of universities do follow ups to find out where you are and what you earn and then advertise their post-degree employment rates. I, perhaps cynically, think some universities have even started "hacking" that process. In Nottingham you can hire graduates from either of our 2 big universities where the University pays part of their salary! [1] [1] https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy-advertising/nottinghaminternship.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy-adver...
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  My hunch is that these surveys would suffer from 1. selection bias (unemployed or low-income graduates would feel embarrassed to respond) 2. the mean of the (biased) sample being much higher than the median (die to outliers)
noelwelsh 9y ago
Very interesting thread. I want to know how to measure effectiveness, beyond "got a job". I think there is more to it than that, and getting a job doesn't work as a yardstick in many contexts (e.g. most commercial training where everyone already has a job.) "99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." I have to agree with this, and yet the appeal remains a deep mystery to me. It's also worth noting that a number of those points are specific to the US system. Basically anything involving money. The maximum tuition LambdaSchool (OP's school) charges for six months is almost enough for three years of tuition here in the UK, or about 50 years in Germany.
- purple-again 9y ago
  Effectiveness is measured by intent. Those who go to University with the intent of getting 'a job' measure their success by getting 'a job'. Those who go to get a deep education on a specific topic...likely measure their success based off their understanding of the topic when they leave. In this day and age I would hazard a guess that over 90% over University students...are there for a job and thats it.
peterwwillis 9y ago
Some other surprising things about school: - parents care more about extracurricular and athletic pursuits than academic. They'll help their kids play a sport, but rather than try to help their children learn, they'll complain that the teachers are not doing their jobs - children react to changes in environment the same way adults do, but this isn't considered by schools because they know the students have no choice but to comply - many children still go hungry at school, making learning difficult to impossible - one in ten children are diagnosed with ADHD; somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 10 may be on stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants, etc - private schools may pay half the salaries of public school teachers, and their curriculums are not as strict (virtuslly no required curriculum) - children are still told today (by teachers) that they will be destitute and homeless if they do not go to college, but they do not provide any extra assistance either, making them either extra stressed or give up - teachers pay, pensions, etc and overall school budgets are still cut short by politicians whenever they need to trim their budgets, while other areas of budgets are increased - children in 8th grade often have a 3rd grade reading level in many parts of the country, but especially major cities with a history of segregation and a lack of access to jobs - some kids are still booted from one school to the next and used as scape goats if anything negative is on their transcript
- jimhefferon 9y ago
  - There are large numers of people who think, at least in the US, that paying taxes so that other people's kids might get ahead is a dumb idea.
- watwut 9y ago
  I can help my children to learn sport and I can help them learn math. I can not help them learn subjects I have long forgotten or was never good at in the first place. I dont expect teachers to teach my kids sport, I do expect them to teach math and history. Not sure what is wrong with that.
  - peterwwillis 9y ago
    I think what's wrong with that is assuming teachers even can teach your child things that even you weren't good at or can't even remember. Parents seem to think teachers can do things they can't do. But they're not magicians. They're normal adults with textbooks. Many times they're not even experienced in the subjects they're teaching. Teachers have to teach 30 kids at a time, who all have different backgrounds and lives. They can't possibly give them all enough individual attention and time. And somehow they're supposed to get them all to surpass all the factors holding back each specific kid in a myriad of ways, to succeed at the same material, at the same time, at the same pace. They have to be babysitters, disciplinarians, counselors, role models, and educators. And then they get yelled at by parents or lectured by administrators for not keeping up to this standard. It's crazy. It's one of the reasons so many teachers quit within five years. It's one of the reasons it's so hard to find good teachers. And of course, they never pay them accordingly. If it weren't for the fact that teachers are idealistic and want to help children learn, we'd have a nation of morons, because only desperate people would subject themselves to this career.
watwut 9y ago
I think that 3 is consequence of 10 - prototype of working online school was not created yet. On 1: The "is this required" question is direct result of students being goal oriented with their education and time. They do it because they want job or because of social pressure. It sounds depressing, until you realize the alternative is not caring about job when choosing what are you going to learn, which is criticized in other points. We can't have this one both ways. Either it is for purpose of job and they will ask that question, or it is hobby and they will care less about utility (e.g. job).
randomdata 9y ago
> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the gap to solve the specific problem you have. And when the next problem arises, you may continue further into the course. There is no reason to cover everything at once. This flawed opinion about failure may be directly related to #3. > Economically we vastly undervalue education. Because it hasn't shown economic value. The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially. Those who have a degree, on average, make $10k more than those who don't. But since this simply measures high-achieving people against low-achieving people, income conclusions cannot be meaningfully drawn from it. It is important to remember that universities and colleges reject the lowest-achieving people at enrolment time, preventing them from signing up for class entirely. Medium-achievers who make it past the initial filter are put through academic rigour that sees them drop or fail out. That leaves only the highest achieving people able to graduate. Nobody should be surprised that high-achieving people are able to make more money than low-achiving people. This would remain true even if colleges and universities never existed. Finding something that correlates with high-achievers does not tell us anything other than this group of people is more likely to be high achieving. Allowing more and more medium-achievers to graduate from university still leaves them as medium-achievers in life and they will still end up in the medium-achiever work that they always would have (after all, someone has to do it). All while incomes remain stagnant.
- watwut 9y ago
  MOOCs were propagated as alternative to traditional higher education. Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. I remember reading those optimistic articles. At that it failed. It is not cheaper education for non traditional non full time student with lack of money. They drop out faster or equally fast then non traditional students on colleges (who drop out a a lot too). It is great free easy to use option for educated professional through. But, that was not original sell.
carlmr 9y ago
I disagree with #6. I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time, but I need to jump through this hoop to get a job for which I didn't require much more knowledge than the programming knowledge I had after high school (self-taught). But then again I went to school in Europe with cheap tuition, so time is the biggest investment here.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  "I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time" is a humblebrag. There, I said it.
  - hodl 9y ago
    I don't think its a humblebrag. I take it as someone who wants to get on and code but the system requires a hoop to be jumped through.
    - dpark 9y ago
      It really is. It's kind of "I'm so awesome that I learned nothing of value in 4 years at a university". Which is a sad waste of time if true.
      - carlmr 9y ago
        That's not what I said though. I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. I don't regret having studied, I saw a lot of cool stuff. But it's a very long time investment which doesn't lead to an equal ROI in terms of work output if you ask me. It leads to a good ROI mostly in terms of employment offers and salaries, because it has signaling value.
        fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        > I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. What did you study, and what do you do for work?
Normal_gaussian 9y ago
"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I know a lot of advice I did get was wrong, my professors basically said they don't have good advice for me, and I know I'm not making the most of the experience I have behind me. Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.
- golergka 9y ago
  Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece of paper.
  - edraferi 9y ago
    You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand. Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.
    - golergka 9y ago
      I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.
- jackgolding 9y ago
  I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard. The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like: 1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.) 2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support) 3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now) Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.
VLM 9y ago
The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't know, maybe it should be if it isn't. However I never finished the class, only glossed thru the book, and barely remember either. I was curious about the topic, not trying to meet someone elses arbitrary goalpost, and the "graduates" metric isn't a useful number. Kinda the difference between running because its a beautiful day out and I need exercise, and running a competitive marathon against live athletes in person solely for the goal of getting a number when I run thru a gate. I would guess in the general public the former outnumbers the latter 50 to 1, so the MOOC stats aren't unusual at all. Another interesting analogy is "The Mona Lisa" painting is a failure if you measure its worth solely based on number of PHD students graduating who give it credit for them selecting "Art History" as a major. That doesn't mean it needs to be burned as a failure.
- austenallred 9y ago
  OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100 people with the same level of motivation. 90% will complete a live, guided course. 5% will complete a MOOC of the same quality. Which is unfortunate because the live/synchronous part is what is expensive. There was a time when we thought all education was is just a bunch of video lectures, and that if we got a bunch of professors to record their lectures college would be free. We now know that doesn’t work, at least for the vast, vast majority of people, both because we’re unable to discipline ourselves and because most true learning happens in a multi-way environment with accountability measures.
  - kbutler 9y ago
    How are you measuring the same level of motivation? From my anecdotal experience, the people taking the "live, guided course" have committed to: - synchronous attendance at a particular time, probably at a particular place - probably a dollar investment - face-to-face contact with instructor - near-traditional learning environment People taking a MOOC have committed to: - browsing on an electronic device There's generally a really high barrier to entry to the synchronous, guided learning, so it seems like comparing students who have paid tuition and enrolled in a class vs prospective students expressing interest on a university recruitment page.
sp332 9y ago
We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad If the students had their own projects that they were working on, would you know about it? Offhand I'd guess they have things they'd rather be working on than your assigned coursework, so if there's no benefit, why do it?
- mcguire 9y ago
  See note 9.
  - bsenftner 9y ago
    Note 9 is why I gave up trying to mentor developers. Relevant background: I've held a career that is a dream of high profile projects: game studio owner at age 17, beta developer for original Mac in '83; on Mandelbrot & DeVanney's original Fractal research team, 3D graphics research community during the 80's; engineer on the 3DO and then original PlayStation OS teams; 15 years as a lead game developer of major release titles; 5 years VFX developer and artist and financial analysis for 9 major release VFX heavy feature films; and now 10 years in machine learning and facial recognition. I love to mentor developers. I ran a free coworking space for 3 years where I tried mentoring many, many starting-their-career developers. I also have both undergrad and graduate school teaching experience. Out of perhaps 3 dozen mentoring situations, only 2 people actually took the opportunity seriously. Both of them went from nearly minimum wage shit coding jobs to real development companies making in excess of $70K. The other 34 people I tried to mentor never even finished the first "let's see if this person is serious" task I gave them.
    - austenallred 9y ago
      You should chat with us. Filtering for interest is important, but is very possible. We have 300+ very motivated students enrolled right now from thousands of interested applicants.
      - 9y ago
austenallred 9y ago
OP here, also happen to be a YC founder (S17 - https://lambdaschool.com https://lambdaschool.com). Shocked to see this on HN. A lot of people are asking me about number 7: > 7. We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane. We train people to be software engineers for free in exchange for a portion of their future income for two years (we only get paid if they make above a certain salary threshold doing what we train them to, otherwise we don't get paid). So as a school we focus on eliminating the risk and upfront cost to the student, which lets many brilliant people access a world-class education who otherwise might not afford to. We're also incentivized to make the perfect school that will cause you to be successful in your career, and those incentives make an enormous difference. The average stats from our first classes are remarkable: our average student increased his or her annual income by over $40,000/yr, 50% were hired within weeks, and the median salary was $90,000, including a lot of low-cost-of-living areas. Since we're paying for all the other costs of running a world-class school without upfront revenue (we're spending over $300,000/month all-in right now), we're not in the place to pay for living expenses as well, and currently students need to cover their own living expenses for six months. Usually they can live with family, some have part-time jobs, we do have a part-time program, etc. but it's never easy. This kind of small discrepancy forcing people to quit is something we see all. the. time. I probably see a similar situation with different small dollar amounts weekly. There are times when I am fairly confident I can swing someone's future earning power by several million dollars, but I don't have the thousand dollars it takes to do that. It's incredibly frustrating. We can partner with lending companies, but if they're paying for students' living expenses they also require students to pay their tuition upfront and be saddled with debt, which goes against our mission, and we think there has to be a better way. I'm looking into raising some sort of non-profit, living-expenses-only fund/endowment to lend during these sorts of shortfalls, but I'm new to raising nonprofit dollars. If anyone has any suggestions I'm happy to hear them. I don't have a good sense of what the interest rates would need to be for this to work in a for-profit world, so we'll see.
- tsumnia 9y ago
  With respect to #15 and 16, how is LambdaSchool not the same AND what happens if your numbers do not go as projected? How will you avoid becoming these points in the future if LambdaSchool does not gain traction?
artimaeis 9y ago
> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a single one of them. Instead I learned the concepts I needed to, maybe completed some test material if it was freely available, and moved on. Some of those MOOCs were gateways into my career as a developer - so they were absolutely vital to me. This again seems to be an issue with measurement/metrics - I don't believe completion rates are worth that much in MOOCs, just like they aren't worth that much in technical books.
- d0mine 9y ago
  I wonder do MOOCs 2% in absolute numbers exceed the number of students in traditional universities e.g., Coursera had "over 22 millions enrollments" (2014?) http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/about/about-Learning-How-To-Learn.html http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/about/about-Learning-How-To-Learn.html 2% from several millions is more than the number of students enrolled in any UK universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_enrolment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_Un...
  - tsumnia 9y ago
    Its a currently studied phenomena (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10671-7_4 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10671-7_...) My personal thought is its the same reason people quit gyms , fail at New Year's Resolutions, or even quit Free-to-Play games. It is difficult to create and maintain habit.
- mnx 9y ago
  I can also confirm I've had this experience. I learned a lot from MOOCs I never completed. That's why I like Khan Academy's model for educational content - aligned in paths, and with some gamification around completing, but ultimately made to be searchable, and relatively easy to pick up in the middle. And that's how I've used it as well - I probably have only a module or two completed, but I've watched many videos just trying to get a better grasp on one concept that wasn't well enough explained in a book I was using, or just to refresh my recollection.
imrankhan2601 9y ago
great piece (y)
dandersh 9y ago
"1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad" That's because they are responding to the incentives that have been placed before them. Learning, when it happens, is done so in the pursuit of some form of achievement/validation (grades, test scores, etc.) Yes, properly evaluating learning capacity and knowledge accumulation is difficult, evidenced by the popularity of algorithm/fizzbuzz whiteboard problems. However the major issue is that culturally there is a lack of passion towards accepting ignorance and trying to learn ("We'll fix the problem with common sense"!), as well an open hostility by some towards those that are educated. "9. 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." This is caused partly (if not mostly) from issue number 1: Self direction and self control is absent from schooling. When no one is around to tell you what to do and yell at you when you don't do it, it's no surprise then that people lack the interest and discipline to pursue self-education when it is available to them.
nmca 9y ago
Anecdotally, I think I signed up for a MOOC back when that's what you had to do to hear Hinton's explanation of RMSProp. Of course I didn't complete it; I just fished out the bit I needed. I'm deeply dubious of these completion metrics...
romaniv 9y ago
>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocre lecturing from some random guy who happened to teach the subject at the nearby university at that time. After: I can watch lectures from world-class professors and universities at any time, starting with any difficulty level, on a wide variety of subjects. I can also get free help from other people if I need to. How is this a failure? MOOCs are one of the greatest thing that ever happened to the Internet and education.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.
  - romaniv 9y ago
    I would be ecstatic if I had an option to replace some of my university classes with MOOCs. The leap in quality of lecturing would be gigantic. MOOCs made me realize that most of the subjects in college I found "complicated" really weren't. I just had horrendous professors and bad books. I'm currently in the process of "fixing" my college education by watching lectures on fundamental subjects like biology (which I never had in college for some reason), chemistry (which was taught really badly) and linear algebra (taught awfully). It's astounding how many new things I'm picking up. Plus, there are classes like AI, Cryptography, Model Thinking and so on. Nothing of this sort was available to me in college at all.
twblalock 9y ago
> 1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad I suppose this is sad for academics, who teach as though they expect all of their students to become academics. But the students are just being realistic -- for almost all of them, an education is preparation for a career. I was in academia for a little while and it was amazing how many professors just didn't understand that.
georgeecollins 9y ago
> "Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail." I don't know the facts-- and none are presented in the tweet-- but I do have a friend whose very job is to run studies on the effectiveness of programs at a University. I am sure this person is not alone. Even if "most" (asserted) universities don't have a way to measure their effectiveness, the fact is that many of the best do and they all tend to benchmark each other. I would be really curious what the author is basing his assertion on because I think it is likely schools research a lot of things (like their effectiveness) but don't release that information publicly for many reasons.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time. #1 school for this metric. In the Top 10 for some other metric. Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.
  - georgeecollins 9y ago
    Right, and they know a lot about things they may have reasons not to share. Like, what majors are people likely to drop out of, which groups they accept are least likely to finish.
andreykurenkov 9y ago
" 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." Do people on here agree with this? I think that is far too cynical... education (even this guy's education) tends to be misaligned from a person's actual interests, and so most would rather not do it in their free time. But I do think people want to do work/productive things and not just watch Netflix.
- ebiester 9y ago
  It depends. Most people are exhausted at the end of the workday. It isn't the time that is the key component; it's the energy. Give me a few days to a week of pure relaxation, and my creative juices start to flow.
red_admiral 9y ago
About that 2% completion rate. Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it. Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it. Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" and "online" could contribute to. I have signed up to many MOOCs and completed a couple. I consider that a net benefit. MOOCs are not going to replace university education any time soon in my opinion, but for people who don't have the university option in the first place or want to take a single course every now and then they're a great thing.
- throwawaymsft 9y ago
  It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple. People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?) When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong academic confidence, they may be demoralized by giving up/failing a course. We shouldn't be happy that 5% of people enjoy high school math class if 95% of people graduate hating it, and never touch the subject again. We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned. "That pill I sold you, turns out it's no better than placebo... but placebos are 30% effective, so it all worked out, right?"
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. Most of the free MOOCs I've registered for I've not really had a particularly strong intent to finish. (Paid MOOCs are a different story.) > (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?) Because of a preference for interactive vs. static content, for one thing. > We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned. Actually, being low-barrier-to-entry so as to support more experimental, low-commitment exploration—which logically implies a lower completion rate—is a big part of how free MOOCs were positioned.
nazgulnarsil 9y ago
If MOOCs are an even better measure of conscientiousness than live courses then the market should eventually price that in.
edanm 9y ago
A new book just came out by economist Bryan Caplan, called "The Case Against Education". The basic thesis is that school isn't mostly about teaching/learning - it's mostly about signaling to future employers that you are smart enough (and conformist enough) to get through school. He guesses it's about 80/20 between signaling and actual education. It's interesting to read most discussions of education with that idea in mind - his assumptions solve a lot of puzzles of how/why education works the way that it works.
AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> Everyone knows too many people attending universities don’t consider the financial burden, but NO ONE thinks about the time. Four years is a LONG time, but it doesn’t enter into peoples’ thinking generally when deciding if they should get a degree You're right, I hadn't thought about the time. From 18 to 65 is 47 years; four years is a significant chunk of that. It's still a reasonable chunk if you come out of it with a degree that helps you get a good job (or, to worry less about credentials, with training that makes you more productive, or a mental framework that improves your life). But if you spend the four years, don't get a degree (or don't get one that gets you anywhere), and don't learn anything life-changing, four years is a lot of time.
RandComment 9y ago
> Lack of access to a computer almost kept some of our best students from being able to attend. Those aren’t expensive. This is a bias from the lower middle to upper class. A computer without some knowledge or support to maintain it (more costs) make that price rise.
deleted 9y ago
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277 points by shubhamjain 9y ago

As a museum educator turned classroom teacher, this resonates with me. Readings that may be relevant to those who find this Twitter thread intriguing: - "On the Wildness of Children," on what kind of educational experiences we might imagine for our children if we consider what children are like first: http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/ http://carolblack.org/on-the-wildness-of-children/ - "Deschooling Society" (on my reading list): https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety https://archive.org/embed/DeschoolingSociety

baursak 9y ago
You should also check out "Free to Learn" and "Free at Last" books, and Sudbury school model. As a parent, it's something I've been contemplating a lot, but haven't quite committed to yet.

triplesec 9y ago

Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

icebraining 9y ago
It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  You're describing one of the other points he makes in this: as bad as you think for profit education is, it's worse. Austen has been railing against places like University of Phoenix, etc for a while as what's been discovered about them is just nuts. The stat that stood out for me was that at one point they had a substantial number of recruiters (thousands) but exactly zero job placement staff.
- kthejoker2 9y ago
  The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds. That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    OP here. We are a school that is completely free and takes a percentage of income (though for two years, not for life). Even still the $400 to make it through the last month was a barrier. We’re working on having a fund available for living expenses, but “I’m going to pay you cash so you can go to school” is a different risk profile than “This School is free until you’re hired.”
    - kthejoker2 9y ago
      That's awesome. The only reason the school should take the burden is to distribute the risk pool and also theyre the most capable of providing some value framework on whether this $400 or that $400 is a better investment. I personally would loan money for this sort of thing if there was a reasonable ROI and someone vetting the students.
- austenallred 9y ago
  Lenders aren’t very good at quantifying future changes in income. They’re trying, but it’s a hard problem to solve.
bane 9y ago
I don't think it's that surprising. Anecdote: Right after I barely graduated from High School after my family clawed its way out of homelessness, I spent a few years working minimum wage jobs with long commutes in an old car. I could barely afford gas and groceries let alone decent housing and college. After about 3 years of work, I managed to scrape together just enough to enroll in my local community college for two semesters, one class per semester. Total cost? At that time about $400 including books. And that $400 could have vaporized with one flat tire, or one visit to the doctor. An acquaintance of my parents heard that I was going to college, suddenly took an interest and hired me sight unseen to come work at his startup in an entry-level developer job at 3x my then current pay. I worked there for a couple years and when I was close to finishing college, another acquaintance hired me and doubled my pay. After that I was attached to a growing career and haven't looked back. But it all started with getting that tiny little bit of money together.
- mcherm 9y ago
  It is incredibly surprising. You aren't surprised because you have experienced this. But any economist would look at this and say something like this: > You claim that there are people where an investment of $400 would > quickly (within a couple of years) give them a salary increase in > the range of $20,000 to $50,000 per year. That is obviously untrue. > If it WERE true, then at lease ONE person in the country would have > spent $4,000 to seed a 10-person program which granted the $400 in > exchange for a promise to contribute $8,000 back in a couple of > years. A x20 replication factor would easily swamp administrative > costs and participants who refuse to pay afterward and the program > would still be growing exponentially. I think the source of the fallacy is that while there ARE people for whom $400 is a difficult-to-surmount barrier beyond which no other major impediments stand between them and middle-class success, they are an impossible-to-find minority in a sea of people who are willing to ASK for $400 and those for whom $400 is a major impediment, but further impediments would prevent them from succeeding. Alternately, we can look at the literally thousands of charities (including schools themselves) that offer merit-based and need-based scholarships, and conclude that the economist is partly right and the system DOES exist, but isn't meeting all of the need.
twblalock 9y ago
Why couldn't that student take out a student loan, like most students?

mattmanser 9y ago

In the UK at least, 2 isn't true, loads of universities do follow ups to find out where you are and what you earn and then advertise their post-degree employment rates. I, perhaps cynically, think some universities have even started "hacking" that process. In Nottingham you can hire graduates from either of our 2 big universities where the University pays part of their salary! [1] [1] https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy-advertising/nottinghaminternship.aspx https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/careers/employers/vacancy-adver...

rahimnathwani 9y ago
My hunch is that these surveys would suffer from 1. selection bias (unemployed or low-income graduates would feel embarrassed to respond) 2. the mean of the (biased) sample being much higher than the median (die to outliers)

noelwelsh 9y ago

Very interesting thread. I want to know how to measure effectiveness, beyond "got a job". I think there is more to it than that, and getting a job doesn't work as a yardstick in many contexts (e.g. most commercial training where everyone already has a job.) "99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." I have to agree with this, and yet the appeal remains a deep mystery to me. It's also worth noting that a number of those points are specific to the US system. Basically anything involving money. The maximum tuition LambdaSchool (OP's school) charges for six months is almost enough for three years of tuition here in the UK, or about 50 years in Germany.

purple-again 9y ago
Effectiveness is measured by intent. Those who go to University with the intent of getting 'a job' measure their success by getting 'a job'. Those who go to get a deep education on a specific topic...likely measure their success based off their understanding of the topic when they leave. In this day and age I would hazard a guess that over 90% over University students...are there for a job and thats it.

peterwwillis 9y ago

Some other surprising things about school: - parents care more about extracurricular and athletic pursuits than academic. They'll help their kids play a sport, but rather than try to help their children learn, they'll complain that the teachers are not doing their jobs - children react to changes in environment the same way adults do, but this isn't considered by schools because they know the students have no choice but to comply - many children still go hungry at school, making learning difficult to impossible - one in ten children are diagnosed with ADHD; somewhere between 1 in 20 and 1 in 10 may be on stimulants, antipsychotics, antidepressants, etc - private schools may pay half the salaries of public school teachers, and their curriculums are not as strict (virtuslly no required curriculum) - children are still told today (by teachers) that they will be destitute and homeless if they do not go to college, but they do not provide any extra assistance either, making them either extra stressed or give up - teachers pay, pensions, etc and overall school budgets are still cut short by politicians whenever they need to trim their budgets, while other areas of budgets are increased - children in 8th grade often have a 3rd grade reading level in many parts of the country, but especially major cities with a history of segregation and a lack of access to jobs - some kids are still booted from one school to the next and used as scape goats if anything negative is on their transcript

jimhefferon 9y ago
- There are large numers of people who think, at least in the US, that paying taxes so that other people's kids might get ahead is a dumb idea.
watwut 9y ago
I can help my children to learn sport and I can help them learn math. I can not help them learn subjects I have long forgotten or was never good at in the first place. I dont expect teachers to teach my kids sport, I do expect them to teach math and history. Not sure what is wrong with that.
- peterwwillis 9y ago
  I think what's wrong with that is assuming teachers even can teach your child things that even you weren't good at or can't even remember. Parents seem to think teachers can do things they can't do. But they're not magicians. They're normal adults with textbooks. Many times they're not even experienced in the subjects they're teaching. Teachers have to teach 30 kids at a time, who all have different backgrounds and lives. They can't possibly give them all enough individual attention and time. And somehow they're supposed to get them all to surpass all the factors holding back each specific kid in a myriad of ways, to succeed at the same material, at the same time, at the same pace. They have to be babysitters, disciplinarians, counselors, role models, and educators. And then they get yelled at by parents or lectured by administrators for not keeping up to this standard. It's crazy. It's one of the reasons so many teachers quit within five years. It's one of the reasons it's so hard to find good teachers. And of course, they never pay them accordingly. If it weren't for the fact that teachers are idealistic and want to help children learn, we'd have a nation of morons, because only desperate people would subject themselves to this career.

watwut 9y ago

I think that 3 is consequence of 10 - prototype of working online school was not created yet. On 1: The "is this required" question is direct result of students being goal oriented with their education and time. They do it because they want job or because of social pressure. It sounds depressing, until you realize the alternative is not caring about job when choosing what are you going to learn, which is criticized in other points. We can't have this one both ways. Either it is for purpose of job and they will ask that question, or it is hobby and they will care less about utility (e.g. job).

randomdata 9y ago

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the gap to solve the specific problem you have. And when the next problem arises, you may continue further into the course. There is no reason to cover everything at once. This flawed opinion about failure may be directly related to #3. > Economically we vastly undervalue education. Because it hasn't shown economic value. The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially. Those who have a degree, on average, make $10k more than those who don't. But since this simply measures high-achieving people against low-achieving people, income conclusions cannot be meaningfully drawn from it. It is important to remember that universities and colleges reject the lowest-achieving people at enrolment time, preventing them from signing up for class entirely. Medium-achievers who make it past the initial filter are put through academic rigour that sees them drop or fail out. That leaves only the highest achieving people able to graduate. Nobody should be surprised that high-achieving people are able to make more money than low-achiving people. This would remain true even if colleges and universities never existed. Finding something that correlates with high-achievers does not tell us anything other than this group of people is more likely to be high achieving. Allowing more and more medium-achievers to graduate from university still leaves them as medium-achievers in life and they will still end up in the medium-achiever work that they always would have (after all, someone has to do it). All while incomes remain stagnant.

watwut 9y ago
MOOCs were propagated as alternative to traditional higher education. Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. I remember reading those optimistic articles. At that it failed. It is not cheaper education for non traditional non full time student with lack of money. They drop out faster or equally fast then non traditional students on colleges (who drop out a a lot too). It is great free easy to use option for educated professional through. But, that was not original sell.

carlmr 9y ago

I disagree with #6. I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time, but I need to jump through this hoop to get a job for which I didn't require much more knowledge than the programming knowledge I had after high school (self-taught). But then again I went to school in Europe with cheap tuition, so time is the biggest investment here.

fwdpropaganda 9y ago
"I always felt like getting a degree is such a huge waste of time" is a humblebrag. There, I said it.
- hodl 9y ago
  I don't think its a humblebrag. I take it as someone who wants to get on and code but the system requires a hoop to be jumped through.
  - dpark 9y ago
    It really is. It's kind of "I'm so awesome that I learned nothing of value in 4 years at a university". Which is a sad waste of time if true.
    - carlmr 9y ago
      That's not what I said though. I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. I don't regret having studied, I saw a lot of cool stuff. But it's a very long time investment which doesn't lead to an equal ROI in terms of work output if you ask me. It leads to a good ROI mostly in terms of employment offers and salaries, because it has signaling value.
      - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
        > I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. What did you study, and what do you do for work?

Normal_gaussian 9y ago

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I know a lot of advice I did get was wrong, my professors basically said they don't have good advice for me, and I know I'm not making the most of the experience I have behind me. Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.

golergka 9y ago
Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece of paper.
- edraferi 9y ago
  You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand. Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.
  - golergka 9y ago
    I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.
jackgolding 9y ago
I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard. The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like: 1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.) 2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support) 3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now) Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.

VLM 9y ago

The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't know, maybe it should be if it isn't. However I never finished the class, only glossed thru the book, and barely remember either. I was curious about the topic, not trying to meet someone elses arbitrary goalpost, and the "graduates" metric isn't a useful number. Kinda the difference between running because its a beautiful day out and I need exercise, and running a competitive marathon against live athletes in person solely for the goal of getting a number when I run thru a gate. I would guess in the general public the former outnumbers the latter 50 to 1, so the MOOC stats aren't unusual at all. Another interesting analogy is "The Mona Lisa" painting is a failure if you measure its worth solely based on number of PHD students graduating who give it credit for them selecting "Art History" as a major. That doesn't mean it needs to be burned as a failure.

austenallred 9y ago
OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100 people with the same level of motivation. 90% will complete a live, guided course. 5% will complete a MOOC of the same quality. Which is unfortunate because the live/synchronous part is what is expensive. There was a time when we thought all education was is just a bunch of video lectures, and that if we got a bunch of professors to record their lectures college would be free. We now know that doesn’t work, at least for the vast, vast majority of people, both because we’re unable to discipline ourselves and because most true learning happens in a multi-way environment with accountability measures.
- kbutler 9y ago
  How are you measuring the same level of motivation? From my anecdotal experience, the people taking the "live, guided course" have committed to: - synchronous attendance at a particular time, probably at a particular place - probably a dollar investment - face-to-face contact with instructor - near-traditional learning environment People taking a MOOC have committed to: - browsing on an electronic device There's generally a really high barrier to entry to the synchronous, guided learning, so it seems like comparing students who have paid tuition and enrolled in a class vs prospective students expressing interest on a university recruitment page.

sp332 9y ago

We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad If the students had their own projects that they were working on, would you know about it? Offhand I'd guess they have things they'd rather be working on than your assigned coursework, so if there's no benefit, why do it?

mcguire 9y ago
See note 9.
- bsenftner 9y ago
  Note 9 is why I gave up trying to mentor developers. Relevant background: I've held a career that is a dream of high profile projects: game studio owner at age 17, beta developer for original Mac in '83; on Mandelbrot & DeVanney's original Fractal research team, 3D graphics research community during the 80's; engineer on the 3DO and then original PlayStation OS teams; 15 years as a lead game developer of major release titles; 5 years VFX developer and artist and financial analysis for 9 major release VFX heavy feature films; and now 10 years in machine learning and facial recognition. I love to mentor developers. I ran a free coworking space for 3 years where I tried mentoring many, many starting-their-career developers. I also have both undergrad and graduate school teaching experience. Out of perhaps 3 dozen mentoring situations, only 2 people actually took the opportunity seriously. Both of them went from nearly minimum wage shit coding jobs to real development companies making in excess of $70K. The other 34 people I tried to mentor never even finished the first "let's see if this person is serious" task I gave them.
  - austenallred 9y ago
    You should chat with us. Filtering for interest is important, but is very possible. We have 300+ very motivated students enrolled right now from thousands of interested applicants.
    - 9y ago

austenallred 9y ago

OP here, also happen to be a YC founder (S17 - https://lambdaschool.com https://lambdaschool.com). Shocked to see this on HN. A lot of people are asking me about number 7: > 7. We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane. We train people to be software engineers for free in exchange for a portion of their future income for two years (we only get paid if they make above a certain salary threshold doing what we train them to, otherwise we don't get paid). So as a school we focus on eliminating the risk and upfront cost to the student, which lets many brilliant people access a world-class education who otherwise might not afford to. We're also incentivized to make the perfect school that will cause you to be successful in your career, and those incentives make an enormous difference. The average stats from our first classes are remarkable: our average student increased his or her annual income by over $40,000/yr, 50% were hired within weeks, and the median salary was $90,000, including a lot of low-cost-of-living areas. Since we're paying for all the other costs of running a world-class school without upfront revenue (we're spending over $300,000/month all-in right now), we're not in the place to pay for living expenses as well, and currently students need to cover their own living expenses for six months. Usually they can live with family, some have part-time jobs, we do have a part-time program, etc. but it's never easy. This kind of small discrepancy forcing people to quit is something we see all. the. time. I probably see a similar situation with different small dollar amounts weekly. There are times when I am fairly confident I can swing someone's future earning power by several million dollars, but I don't have the thousand dollars it takes to do that. It's incredibly frustrating. We can partner with lending companies, but if they're paying for students' living expenses they also require students to pay their tuition upfront and be saddled with debt, which goes against our mission, and we think there has to be a better way. I'm looking into raising some sort of non-profit, living-expenses-only fund/endowment to lend during these sorts of shortfalls, but I'm new to raising nonprofit dollars. If anyone has any suggestions I'm happy to hear them. I don't have a good sense of what the interest rates would need to be for this to work in a for-profit world, so we'll see.

tsumnia 9y ago
With respect to #15 and 16, how is LambdaSchool not the same AND what happens if your numbers do not go as projected? How will you avoid becoming these points in the future if LambdaSchool does not gain traction?

artimaeis 9y ago

> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a single one of them. Instead I learned the concepts I needed to, maybe completed some test material if it was freely available, and moved on. Some of those MOOCs were gateways into my career as a developer - so they were absolutely vital to me. This again seems to be an issue with measurement/metrics - I don't believe completion rates are worth that much in MOOCs, just like they aren't worth that much in technical books.

d0mine 9y ago
I wonder do MOOCs 2% in absolute numbers exceed the number of students in traditional universities e.g., Coursera had "over 22 millions enrollments" (2014?) http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/about/about-Learning-How-To-Learn.html http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/about/about-Learning-How-To-Learn.html 2% from several millions is more than the number of students enrolled in any UK universities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom_by_enrolment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_universities_in_the_Un...
- tsumnia 9y ago
  Its a currently studied phenomena (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10671-7_4 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-10671-7_...) My personal thought is its the same reason people quit gyms , fail at New Year's Resolutions, or even quit Free-to-Play games. It is difficult to create and maintain habit.
mnx 9y ago
I can also confirm I've had this experience. I learned a lot from MOOCs I never completed. That's why I like Khan Academy's model for educational content - aligned in paths, and with some gamification around completing, but ultimately made to be searchable, and relatively easy to pick up in the middle. And that's how I've used it as well - I probably have only a module or two completed, but I've watched many videos just trying to get a better grasp on one concept that wasn't well enough explained in a book I was using, or just to refresh my recollection.

imrankhan2601 9y ago

great piece (y)

dandersh 9y ago

"1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad" That's because they are responding to the incentives that have been placed before them. Learning, when it happens, is done so in the pursuit of some form of achievement/validation (grades, test scores, etc.) Yes, properly evaluating learning capacity and knowledge accumulation is difficult, evidenced by the popularity of algorithm/fizzbuzz whiteboard problems. However the major issue is that culturally there is a lack of passion towards accepting ignorance and trying to learn ("We'll fix the problem with common sense"!), as well an open hostility by some towards those that are educated. "9. 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." This is caused partly (if not mostly) from issue number 1: Self direction and self control is absent from schooling. When no one is around to tell you what to do and yell at you when you don't do it, it's no surprise then that people lack the interest and discipline to pursue self-education when it is available to them.

nmca 9y ago

Anecdotally, I think I signed up for a MOOC back when that's what you had to do to hear Hinton's explanation of RMSProp. Of course I didn't complete it; I just fished out the bit I needed. I'm deeply dubious of these completion metrics...

romaniv 9y ago

>Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s Before: simply getting familiar with a subject required me to jump through bureaucratic admission hoops, go through arbitrary prerequisites, pay tons of money, bend my life around some class schedule and then get mediocre lecturing from some random guy who happened to teach the subject at the nearby university at that time. After: I can watch lectures from world-class professors and universities at any time, starting with any difficulty level, on a wide variety of subjects. I can also get free help from other people if I need to. How is this a failure? MOOCs are one of the greatest thing that ever happened to the Internet and education.

emodendroket 9y ago
I think they are great if the alternative is nothing. I don't think they are so wonderful if, as many have proposed, they start replacing regular classes in universities people are paying to attend.
- romaniv 9y ago
  I would be ecstatic if I had an option to replace some of my university classes with MOOCs. The leap in quality of lecturing would be gigantic. MOOCs made me realize that most of the subjects in college I found "complicated" really weren't. I just had horrendous professors and bad books. I'm currently in the process of "fixing" my college education by watching lectures on fundamental subjects like biology (which I never had in college for some reason), chemistry (which was taught really badly) and linear algebra (taught awfully). It's astounding how many new things I'm picking up. Plus, there are classes like AI, Cryptography, Model Thinking and so on. Nothing of this sort was available to me in college at all.

twblalock 9y ago

> 1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad I suppose this is sad for academics, who teach as though they expect all of their students to become academics. But the students are just being realistic -- for almost all of them, an education is preparation for a career. I was in academia for a little while and it was amazing how many professors just didn't understand that.

georgeecollins 9y ago

> "Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail." I don't know the facts-- and none are presented in the tweet-- but I do have a friend whose very job is to run studies on the effectiveness of programs at a University. I am sure this person is not alone. Even if "most" (asserted) universities don't have a way to measure their effectiveness, the fact is that many of the best do and they all tend to benchmark each other. I would be really curious what the author is basing his assertion on because I think it is likely schools research a lot of things (like their effectiveness) but don't release that information publicly for many reasons.

UncleEntity 9y ago
I see billboards and the busses that shuttle people between the different ASU campuses going on about their effectiveness all the time. #1 school for this metric. In the Top 10 for some other metric. Even the small California state school I went to goes on and on about the things they're good at...Environmental stuff and getting grads into the Peace Corp.
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  Right, and they know a lot about things they may have reasons not to share. Like, what majors are people likely to drop out of, which groups they accept are least likely to finish.

andreykurenkov 9y ago

" 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix." Do people on here agree with this? I think that is far too cynical... education (even this guy's education) tends to be misaligned from a person's actual interests, and so most would rather not do it in their free time. But I do think people want to do work/productive things and not just watch Netflix.

ebiester 9y ago
It depends. Most people are exhausted at the end of the workday. It isn't the time that is the key component; it's the energy. Give me a few days to a week of pure relaxation, and my creative juices start to flow.

red_admiral 9y ago

About that 2% completion rate. Organisation A runs a traditional class that takes in 100 students. 50 complete it. Organisation B runs a MOOC that, with a bit of advertising, gets 2500 people to sign up for free. 50 complete it. Maybe my made-up numbers are off by orders of magnitude. But "2% completion rate" on its own doesn't sound so terrible if it reaches a much wider audience to start with - which both "free" and "online" could contribute to. I have signed up to many MOOCs and completed a couple. I consider that a net benefit. MOOCs are not going to replace university education any time soon in my opinion, but for people who don't have the university option in the first place or want to take a single course every now and then they're a great thing.

throwawaymsft 9y ago
It sounds fine in theory -- people are being helped -- but in practice, I don't think it's so simple. People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?) When the vast majority of people fail to complete the goal, you decrease their confidence in the process. Unless someone starts with strong academic confidence, they may be demoralized by giving up/failing a course. We shouldn't be happy that 5% of people enjoy high school math class if 95% of people graduate hating it, and never touch the subject again. We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned. "That pill I sold you, turns out it's no better than placebo... but placebos are 30% effective, so it all worked out, right?"
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > People _register_ for a course, presumably, with the goal of finishing it. Most of the free MOOCs I've registered for I've not really had a particularly strong intent to finish. (Paid MOOCs are a different story.) > (Otherwise, why not do a google/wiki search for topic X? Find that specific topic on youtube/MIT OCW?) Because of a preference for interactive vs. static content, for one thing. > We can move goalposts and now pretend that MOOCs primarily exist as a random buffet of knowledge and not replacements for actual courses, but that's not how they were positioned. Actually, being low-barrier-to-entry so as to support more experimental, low-commitment exploration—which logically implies a lower completion rate—is a big part of how free MOOCs were positioned.

nazgulnarsil 9y ago

If MOOCs are an even better measure of conscientiousness than live courses then the market should eventually price that in.

edanm 9y ago

A new book just came out by economist Bryan Caplan, called "The Case Against Education". The basic thesis is that school isn't mostly about teaching/learning - it's mostly about signaling to future employers that you are smart enough (and conformist enough) to get through school. He guesses it's about 80/20 between signaling and actual education. It's interesting to read most discussions of education with that idea in mind - his assumptions solve a lot of puzzles of how/why education works the way that it works.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

> Everyone knows too many people attending universities don’t consider the financial burden, but NO ONE thinks about the time. Four years is a LONG time, but it doesn’t enter into peoples’ thinking generally when deciding if they should get a degree You're right, I hadn't thought about the time. From 18 to 65 is 47 years; four years is a significant chunk of that. It's still a reasonable chunk if you come out of it with a degree that helps you get a good job (or, to worry less about credentials, with training that makes you more productive, or a mental framework that improves your life). But if you spend the four years, don't get a degree (or don't get one that gets you anywhere), and don't learn anything life-changing, four years is a lot of time.

RandComment 9y ago

> Lack of access to a computer almost kept some of our best students from being able to attend. Those aren’t expensive. This is a bias from the lower middle to upper class. A computer without some knowledge or support to maintain it (more costs) make that price rise.

deleted 9y ago

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