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> 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

> 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.
- randomdata 9y ago
  > 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. It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your entire life to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. Like the article points out, a major hurdle for a large segment of the population in accessing brick and mortar schooling is proximity to those brick and mortar schools. Online learning has no such constraints. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and still pop into class whenever you feel like it. If it takes you 80 years to complete your college-level studies, great. To say that is a failure, only a few years after becoming available, seems to miss the point of what alternative means. If a MOOC had to be exactly like brick and mortar schooling, it wouldn't be an alternative, it would be the same thing. Although I concede that a fatal flaw of MOOCs is that there are an infinite number of options online. While it may be impractical to visit 100 different brick and mortar schools to see who teaches a specific topic the best, online it is easy to do so and can be done in an instant. With that, there is no incentive to go through your studies only in one spot that can be tracked by a single entity. This makes it challenging from a business perspective, but not an education perspective.
  - zaarn 9y ago
    >The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. I would rather say it's because neuroplasticity is high until you're still relatively young. In later years it takes more effort to learn and retain.
    - randomdata 9y ago
      17% of college students are already over the age of 35 and that number is growing[1]. This does not seem to be any kind of real impediment. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-older-students-rise-college-classrooms-n191246 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-o...
pjc50 9y ago
> (after all, someone has to do it) Until it gets automated. I think you're over-assuming that people's "achievement level" is a completely general, fixed number, when there are a lot of suggestions that it's more situational. There is some suggestion that the supply of graduates isn't well matched to job market needs, which usually manifests in people being opposed to anything that isn't STEM. But that's not the same thing as an argument about achievement.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education. The whole point of OP is that education does not correlate with achievement, because there are any number of showstopper issues - mostly lack of up-front cash, and/or debt, often in really quite small amounts - that keep talented people from achieving a much more productive and rewarding life. The bigger issue is that social class determines "achievement" far more than either education or talent do. And this is incredibly toxic and destructive, especially over the longer term, because it creates a poverty economy where the entire economy runs at some small fraction of its true potential. The fact that a few people are super-rich doesn't alter this. It's about the opportunity cost of not recognising, nurturing, and rewarding talent and ability on an industrial scale - while using narratives like yours to pretend that the problem is individual personal failure, and not systemic economic self-harm.
- randomdata 9y ago
  > Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education. Not because of education. The education is simply irrelevant and has no bearing on income. The market doesn't value that output. Nobody goes to the grocery store and pays more for produce that is certified as grown by university educated farmers. Why would they?
  - zanny 9y ago
    General consumers are not the customers of education, employers are. And you can bet your bottom dollar that when HR is hiring at Purdue they take the ag science BS grads over the high school grads. Not necessarily because they know what they are doing, but because they have that option - there is no practical reason to not hire a college graduate for almost any job nowadays because there are so many of them looking for work at any rate beyond part time minimum wage. Even if their degree is wholly inappropriate for your job, and even if your job has no reason to expect a college degree, just the fact they have one means two things - A. they can put up with rote bullshit while having the choice not to for years, and B. they are almost always indebted and thus are going to be more loyal to the paycheck.
nickthemagicman 9y ago
>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. Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate. Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable. Suffice to say your statement is not accurate. Education shows massive economic value. However, EVEN if it didn't show massive economic value, exposing young people to a variety of ideas and perspectives before they enter the work world gives them a solid foundation to make decisions and critically think about life is massive value in itself. Human beings are limited by the information in their heads and don't typically seek out new information voluntarily. Education gives them new information to reason about the world with.
- randomdata 9y ago
  > Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate. The original article gives the $10k figure and a quick Google search suggests other sources agree with it. But really, the exact figure is irrelevant. The fatal flaws with that way of measuring income remain. The numbers don't really matter here. > Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable. I don't think the data supports this. Incomes are stagnant for even the lowest income group. Unless you are suggesting that college graduates in the lowest income group are responsible for keeping that lowest income group afloat? If that is the case, what should we take from that? Why are college graduates in the lowest income group in the first place if college attainment leads to higher incomes?
ThrustVectoring 9y ago
>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. Adding $10k to your yearly income does not add $10k to the aggregate yearly income. In large part, educational credentials are a positional good - if we gave out twice as many law degrees, we would not have twice as many practicing lawyers. In other words, completing a degree often helps you get a job at the expense of others who do not hold degrees.

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.

randomdata 9y ago
> 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. It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your entire life to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. Like the article points out, a major hurdle for a large segment of the population in accessing brick and mortar schooling is proximity to those brick and mortar schools. Online learning has no such constraints. You can be out in the middle of nowhere and still pop into class whenever you feel like it. If it takes you 80 years to complete your college-level studies, great. To say that is a failure, only a few years after becoming available, seems to miss the point of what alternative means. If a MOOC had to be exactly like brick and mortar schooling, it wouldn't be an alternative, it would be the same thing. Although I concede that a fatal flaw of MOOCs is that there are an infinite number of options online. While it may be impractical to visit 100 different brick and mortar schools to see who teaches a specific topic the best, online it is easy to do so and can be done in an instant. With that, there is no incentive to go through your studies only in one spot that can be tracked by a single entity. This makes it challenging from a business perspective, but not an education perspective.
- zaarn 9y ago
  >The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. I would rather say it's because neuroplasticity is high until you're still relatively young. In later years it takes more effort to learn and retain.
  - randomdata 9y ago
    17% of college students are already over the age of 35 and that number is growing[1]. This does not seem to be any kind of real impediment. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-older-students-rise-college-classrooms-n191246 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-o...

pjc50 9y ago

> (after all, someone has to do it) Until it gets automated. I think you're over-assuming that people's "achievement level" is a completely general, fixed number, when there are a lot of suggestions that it's more situational. There is some suggestion that the supply of graduates isn't well matched to job market needs, which usually manifests in people being opposed to anything that isn't STEM. But that's not the same thing as an argument about achievement.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education. The whole point of OP is that education does not correlate with achievement, because there are any number of showstopper issues - mostly lack of up-front cash, and/or debt, often in really quite small amounts - that keep talented people from achieving a much more productive and rewarding life. The bigger issue is that social class determines "achievement" far more than either education or talent do. And this is incredibly toxic and destructive, especially over the longer term, because it creates a poverty economy where the entire economy runs at some small fraction of its true potential. The fact that a few people are super-rich doesn't alter this. It's about the opportunity cost of not recognising, nurturing, and rewarding talent and ability on an industrial scale - while using narratives like yours to pretend that the problem is individual personal failure, and not systemic economic self-harm.

randomdata 9y ago
> Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education. Not because of education. The education is simply irrelevant and has no bearing on income. The market doesn't value that output. Nobody goes to the grocery store and pays more for produce that is certified as grown by university educated farmers. Why would they?
- zanny 9y ago
  General consumers are not the customers of education, employers are. And you can bet your bottom dollar that when HR is hiring at Purdue they take the ag science BS grads over the high school grads. Not necessarily because they know what they are doing, but because they have that option - there is no practical reason to not hire a college graduate for almost any job nowadays because there are so many of them looking for work at any rate beyond part time minimum wage. Even if their degree is wholly inappropriate for your job, and even if your job has no reason to expect a college degree, just the fact they have one means two things - A. they can put up with rote bullshit while having the choice not to for years, and B. they are almost always indebted and thus are going to be more loyal to the paycheck.

nickthemagicman 9y ago

>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. Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate. Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable. Suffice to say your statement is not accurate. Education shows massive economic value. However, EVEN if it didn't show massive economic value, exposing young people to a variety of ideas and perspectives before they enter the work world gives them a solid foundation to make decisions and critically think about life is massive value in itself. Human beings are limited by the information in their heads and don't typically seek out new information voluntarily. Education gives them new information to reason about the world with.

randomdata 9y ago
> Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate. The original article gives the $10k figure and a quick Google search suggests other sources agree with it. But really, the exact figure is irrelevant. The fatal flaws with that way of measuring income remain. The numbers don't really matter here. > Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable. I don't think the data supports this. Incomes are stagnant for even the lowest income group. Unless you are suggesting that college graduates in the lowest income group are responsible for keeping that lowest income group afloat? If that is the case, what should we take from that? Why are college graduates in the lowest income group in the first place if college attainment leads to higher incomes?

ThrustVectoring 9y ago

>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. Adding $10k to your yearly income does not add $10k to the aggregate yearly income. In large part, educational credentials are a positional good - if we gave out twice as many law degrees, we would not have twice as many practicing lawyers. In other words, completing a degree often helps you get a job at the expense of others who do not hold degrees.