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I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying t

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually. That being said, the college experience has gone through events like wars, plague, disruption, etc, and has come back before. (Although not at a time when there was such a ready alternative technology at hand.) I'm not yet so worried as some say (wholesale change to the higher education model), unless this goes on for 2-3 years.

skocznymroczny 7y ago
I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I think that is an opinion very popular on HN, so don't worry about the reception.
- swiley 7y ago
  Yeah in the US that’s exactly it. Administrators for the sake of administrators everywhere.
- nicolas_t 7y ago
  I've heard that a lot but I did get a degree from a reputable college in my home country (one of the best in France for my subject matter), yet I've only worked outside of France for my entire professional life and pretty much no French colleges are well ranked on international rankings (mostly because the rankings are biased towards much bigger institutions). And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all. However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    I have the feeling like OPs reputation theory is self fulfilling in the US and a narrow effect that came up with those paid education thing they have over there. It's like that artificial value you get for your extra money. Like wearing the brand of cloth you bought on the outside of it for everybody to see.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    It's different if you worked in France though, right? From what I understand, the grandes écoles are very similar. It's not so much that you'll get an education that's ten times better, but you'll have a degree from a school that says you've been selected for leadership.
    - nicolas_t 7y ago
      Yes, probably, I mean I come indeed from a Grande école but since I've never actually worked in France, it's never really been asked for. And the few times when ranking was important (visas for Japan and Hong Kong), the fact that it's not well ranked internationally means that I got no exta points. In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)
      - luckylion 7y ago
        I absolutely agree that you can have a good career without having a degree (or a degree from the right school), but you will have a very tough time getting beyond a certain threshold. I understand it's very obvious in France for upper management and public/political higher positions that it's not merit-based. The same is true for most countries, with varying degrees of impact and obviousness. But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  This is also the main problem, because it suppresses any real competition. All the while these organisations are grading their own students we will continue to get a somewhat mediocre system.
- echelon 7y ago
  > having a reputable college you can put on your résumé. At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case. All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.
  - throwawayoverhe 7y ago
    > At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Never. > Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate. This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.
- bko 7y ago
  Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling. > Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job. If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium. > Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...
  - supernova87a 7y ago
    This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many) I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more. Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
    - 7y ago
- gonzo41 7y ago
  Before i had a degree, my father said it's really important etc because of all the things you'll learn. Now after he says it's just about making sure doors are open that would have otherwise been closed. I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.
  - bitcharmer 7y ago
    I would agree the door-opening effect is true for many walks of life but it doesn't apply to software engineering and similar disciplines. I'm a drop out; I studied economics and have been doing very technical work (low latency application development) for over 15 years now. Worked for UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, etc. No one ever asked me about my degree. They were all (rightfully) interested in what I can do for them. True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
    - Leherenn 7y ago
      Did you have a hard time getting your foot in the door? After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge. With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.
      - bitcharmer 7y ago
        I was looking for my first job during the dotcom crisis and it took me about 18 months. I took a semi-programming job at slavery-level salary just to get my foot in. What really helped was the fact that I had spent 3 months as an unpaid intern at a reputable software house 2 years earlier. I remember my friends mocking me back than for being a looser and an idiot for "working for free". This sentiment (entitlement?) is even stronger among young people today. They refuse to acknowledge that when you come in with zero experience and nothing to offer and get free training - you are the real beneficiary.
- yc-kraln 7y ago
  I think it's almost exactly the opposite. No one cares what college I went to, but the network I built during my time at University is still paying dividends.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Top tier universities offer both. Proof that you can get in, and once you’re in, a network of others who also can get in.
- supernova87a 7y ago
  Well, it definitely serves a strong filtering mechanism to find people who have a certain level of probably-going-to-behave-in-ways-you-expect when you're trying to hire. Whether that leads to the most optimal outcome is not always clear, but it seems reliable enough (though boring) that many use it as a filter. We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
- govg 7y ago
  This is a pretty common opinion here on HN, and colleges regularly get criticized for being nothing but a brand name.
- intended 7y ago
  This is the popular view on HN. I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here. People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information. But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions. It’s chances to interact in larger groups. It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.) There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas. All of this modulated by the degree. If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example. And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people. Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it. Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem People sorely sorely underestimate what “education” is actually about.
  - Olreich 7y ago
    I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think it strongly argues for university being highly inefficient compared to optimal education strategies. University cohorts should probably be smaller, with smaller class sizes and more stringent entry requirements to work toward the ideal 1:1 student:teacher ratios. Sure it’s more expensive, but if you get 2 std deviations out of it, that’s huge. For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries. Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.
- ekianjo 7y ago
  i dont see why the two are mutually exclusive or something. You can both have a reasonable education in a college AND have it play a role as signaling as well, because nobody is going to check what you studied in details.
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  They’re not unrelated. Part of going to an elite school is the ability to network with older elite school members; this is literally what fraternities are for.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  You dont need to have that to get a great high paying job. Most jobs in the tech industry are talent based not merit based. There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.
- ThrowawayR2 7y ago
  > "...the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé." That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program. It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.
- dahart 7y ago
  Why do you feel like that, what evidence is there for your hypothesis in your personal life, or in statistics that you’re aware of? There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up. FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.
- munchbunny 7y ago
  I highly disagree with this one. I have one of those brand name diplomas, but the piece of paper is largely irrelevant. Nobody has cared or even asked about it since maybe 3 years out of college. As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.) Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career: 1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network. 2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs. 3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester). 4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields. 5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one. 6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.
- izzydata 7y ago
  I think it depends if you actually intend to learn something or not. College is really only what you make of it.
- zjaffee 7y ago
  The main value is extra curriculars being of a higher caliber at top colleges than at lower tier ones. Getting to engage with other very talented people building organizations and so on in a much more serious way matters. There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.
mav3rick 7y ago
Assignments are often locked down.
yodsanklai 7y ago
> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it. Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks. I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.
- zelos 7y ago
  >If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.
  - wolfgke 7y ago
    For me, it rather was "I had so much to do for courses that I had hardly any time to make use of or appreciate the incredible amount of ressources."
  - whymauri 7y ago
    Also, a lot of classes are essentially impossible online. Intense lab courses, term-long project courses, and time-sensitive experimentation courses are all screwed. The way classes are coping is interesting: 1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk. 2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project. 3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes. 4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point. A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.
mesaframe 7y ago
From my experience the social aspect of college is definitely worth it. Ofc, you may find a group outside college then there is no need for that. Otherwise college is the best place to get socially better.
red_admiral 7y ago
One thing I've definitely noticed in CS is that having a TA sit next to you in the computer lab and help you debug your code is a huge value add, and if it's only to track down a misplaced comma in "Introduction to C". Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.
- whymauri 7y ago
  Currently a student, and I completely agree. The strain is both ways, too. Since timezones are now a very fluid concept, you're seeing courses accommodating completely new challenges in TA-ship. Some TAs have relocated entirely, which means that the course staff can be much smaller than anticipated. For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom. Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.
furyg3 7y ago
For me, university was a bit more about direction-finding and serendipity. Few places can expose you to very different things in both a structured and unstructured way as college. When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do. While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did. It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.
- yardie 7y ago
  > I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied. I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors. Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Something curiously missing from HN threads about uni is the social aspect. I consider my social experience in uni, from living with other students (instead of mom and dad) to studying abroad for a year, just as if not more valuable than the academics, and a major catalyst for finding what I wanted out of life. There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.
agumonkey 7y ago
Depending on the place and people (i wasn't very well when I was in college), MOOCs can be better in many metrics. - less anxiety being in IRC than in class - more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure) - more communication with other students and teachers - automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly
- cblades 7y ago
  You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me: - I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material. - I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time. - I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person. - Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos. Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale. >Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.
- 7y ago
ashtonkem 7y ago
College has never gone through an event like this at the scale it currently is at. The idea that every American should attend college is a relatively new one; during the last pandemic in America only a tiny percentage of Americans went to college.
pharke 7y ago
I think there is a lot of value in learning in the same place that others are learning. You have a set schedule, you have people to discuss the material with, you can learn from other students, you gain experience working with peers in a group. That being said, all of this can be done without the actual institution of college as it now exists. If you could organize a small group of people that want to learn the same material then all you need is a place to meet. The only things lacking then would be access to the professor and access to a lab but those have solutions as well, you can look for someone who has already graduated from a similar program at a high level or someone working in the field and ask them if they could work with the group or answer questions and for lab work you can search out a hacker space or other community group that has the required materials or maybe split the cost of buying the equipment with your group. I'll admit there's a hard limit to how far this will go, graduates != experienced educators and some equipment will only exist at universities or research institutions but I'm pretty sure that 80% of what is currently done at college could be done in a coffee shop with good wifi.
jibolash 7y ago
> There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually. Maybe even this is not that hard. People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"
4weekoldroses 7y ago
How much of Harvard and MIT's catalogs are actually online in their entirety? (incl. textual resources, coursework, answers, etc.) IIRC it was more like a few handfuls of introductory courses.
KoftaBob 7y ago
As many have said, the bulk of the value of going to college is in the signaling they're able to provide. You're paying (overpaying in my opinion) for the infrastructure they've put in place to adequately assess your abilities in a way that employers can trust. Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.
gumby 7y ago
When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were enough)
- ghaff 7y ago
  Yeah, the original concept of OCW wasn't really as materials directly for "end users" at all. I imagine this also helped sell the concept; "people like our current students aren't even the audience for OCW." Over time, OCW has added more things like video lectures as video became cheaper and more ubiquitous but it never had a stated objective of being a course in a box for students to consume directly. A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.
shrimp_emoji 7y ago
>the networking, friends, social aspect The what?
munchbunny 7y ago
I think the college experience will survive precisely because the value add is the social aspect and the cross-pollination that comes from being near tons of people in lots of fields working on interesting things. Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes. In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.
dehrmann 7y ago
> what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.
davesque 7y ago
> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? Ivy league and other high end colleges are much more a brand than they are a product.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

enitihas 7y ago
I think that is an opinion very popular on HN, so don't worry about the reception.
swiley 7y ago
Yeah in the US that’s exactly it. Administrators for the sake of administrators everywhere.
nicolas_t 7y ago
I've heard that a lot but I did get a degree from a reputable college in my home country (one of the best in France for my subject matter), yet I've only worked outside of France for my entire professional life and pretty much no French colleges are well ranked on international rankings (mostly because the rankings are biased towards much bigger institutions). And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all. However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.
- Krasnol 7y ago
  I have the feeling like OPs reputation theory is self fulfilling in the US and a narrow effect that came up with those paid education thing they have over there. It's like that artificial value you get for your extra money. Like wearing the brand of cloth you bought on the outside of it for everybody to see.
- luckylion 7y ago
  It's different if you worked in France though, right? From what I understand, the grandes écoles are very similar. It's not so much that you'll get an education that's ten times better, but you'll have a degree from a school that says you've been selected for leadership.
  - nicolas_t 7y ago
    Yes, probably, I mean I come indeed from a Grande école but since I've never actually worked in France, it's never really been asked for. And the few times when ranking was important (visas for Japan and Hong Kong), the fact that it's not well ranked internationally means that I got no exta points. In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)
    - luckylion 7y ago
      I absolutely agree that you can have a good career without having a degree (or a degree from the right school), but you will have a very tough time getting beyond a certain threshold. I understand it's very obvious in France for upper management and public/political higher positions that it's not merit-based. The same is true for most countries, with varying degrees of impact and obviousness. But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.
tonyedgecombe 7y ago
This is also the main problem, because it suppresses any real competition. All the while these organisations are grading their own students we will continue to get a somewhat mediocre system.
echelon 7y ago
> having a reputable college you can put on your résumé. At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case. All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.
- throwawayoverhe 7y ago
  > At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university? Never. > Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate. This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.
bko 7y ago
Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling. > Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job. If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium. > Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-college-good-for/546590/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...
- supernova87a 7y ago
  This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many) I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more. Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.
  - 7y ago
gonzo41 7y ago
Before i had a degree, my father said it's really important etc because of all the things you'll learn. Now after he says it's just about making sure doors are open that would have otherwise been closed. I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.
- bitcharmer 7y ago
  I would agree the door-opening effect is true for many walks of life but it doesn't apply to software engineering and similar disciplines. I'm a drop out; I studied economics and have been doing very technical work (low latency application development) for over 15 years now. Worked for UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC, etc. No one ever asked me about my degree. They were all (rightfully) interested in what I can do for them. True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.
  - Leherenn 7y ago
    Did you have a hard time getting your foot in the door? After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge. With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.
    - bitcharmer 7y ago
      I was looking for my first job during the dotcom crisis and it took me about 18 months. I took a semi-programming job at slavery-level salary just to get my foot in. What really helped was the fact that I had spent 3 months as an unpaid intern at a reputable software house 2 years earlier. I remember my friends mocking me back than for being a looser and an idiot for "working for free". This sentiment (entitlement?) is even stronger among young people today. They refuse to acknowledge that when you come in with zero experience and nothing to offer and get free training - you are the real beneficiary.
yc-kraln 7y ago
I think it's almost exactly the opposite. No one cares what college I went to, but the network I built during my time at University is still paying dividends.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Top tier universities offer both. Proof that you can get in, and once you’re in, a network of others who also can get in.
supernova87a 7y ago
Well, it definitely serves a strong filtering mechanism to find people who have a certain level of probably-going-to-behave-in-ways-you-expect when you're trying to hire. Whether that leads to the most optimal outcome is not always clear, but it seems reliable enough (though boring) that many use it as a filter. We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?
govg 7y ago
This is a pretty common opinion here on HN, and colleges regularly get criticized for being nothing but a brand name.
intended 7y ago
This is the popular view on HN. I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here. People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information. But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions. It’s chances to interact in larger groups. It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.) There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas. All of this modulated by the degree. If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example. And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people. Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it. Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem People sorely sorely underestimate what “education” is actually about.
- Olreich 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think it strongly argues for university being highly inefficient compared to optimal education strategies. University cohorts should probably be smaller, with smaller class sizes and more stringent entry requirements to work toward the ideal 1:1 student:teacher ratios. Sure it’s more expensive, but if you get 2 std deviations out of it, that’s huge. For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries. Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.
ekianjo 7y ago
i dont see why the two are mutually exclusive or something. You can both have a reasonable education in a college AND have it play a role as signaling as well, because nobody is going to check what you studied in details.
ashtonkem 7y ago
They’re not unrelated. Part of going to an elite school is the ability to network with older elite school members; this is literally what fraternities are for.
ThomPete 7y ago
You dont need to have that to get a great high paying job. Most jobs in the tech industry are talent based not merit based. There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.
ThrowawayR2 7y ago
> "...the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé." That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program. It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.
dahart 7y ago
Why do you feel like that, what evidence is there for your hypothesis in your personal life, or in statistics that you’re aware of? There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up. FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.
munchbunny 7y ago
I highly disagree with this one. I have one of those brand name diplomas, but the piece of paper is largely irrelevant. Nobody has cared or even asked about it since maybe 3 years out of college. As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.) Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career: 1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network. 2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs. 3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester). 4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields. 5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one. 6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.
izzydata 7y ago
I think it depends if you actually intend to learn something or not. College is really only what you make of it.
zjaffee 7y ago
The main value is extra curriculars being of a higher caliber at top colleges than at lower tier ones. Getting to engage with other very talented people building organizations and so on in a much more serious way matters. There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.

mav3rick 7y ago

Assignments are often locked down.

yodsanklai 7y ago

> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it. Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks. I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.

zelos 7y ago
>If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  For me, it rather was "I had so much to do for courses that I had hardly any time to make use of or appreciate the incredible amount of ressources."
- whymauri 7y ago
  Also, a lot of classes are essentially impossible online. Intense lab courses, term-long project courses, and time-sensitive experimentation courses are all screwed. The way classes are coping is interesting: 1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk. 2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project. 3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes. 4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point. A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.

mesaframe 7y ago

From my experience the social aspect of college is definitely worth it. Ofc, you may find a group outside college then there is no need for that. Otherwise college is the best place to get socially better.

red_admiral 7y ago

One thing I've definitely noticed in CS is that having a TA sit next to you in the computer lab and help you debug your code is a huge value add, and if it's only to track down a misplaced comma in "Introduction to C". Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.

whymauri 7y ago
Currently a student, and I completely agree. The strain is both ways, too. Since timezones are now a very fluid concept, you're seeing courses accommodating completely new challenges in TA-ship. Some TAs have relocated entirely, which means that the course staff can be much smaller than anticipated. For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom. Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.

furyg3 7y ago

For me, university was a bit more about direction-finding and serendipity. Few places can expose you to very different things in both a structured and unstructured way as college. When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do. While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did. It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.

yardie 7y ago
> I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied. I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors. Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
Something curiously missing from HN threads about uni is the social aspect. I consider my social experience in uni, from living with other students (instead of mom and dad) to studying abroad for a year, just as if not more valuable than the academics, and a major catalyst for finding what I wanted out of life. There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.

agumonkey 7y ago

Depending on the place and people (i wasn't very well when I was in college), MOOCs can be better in many metrics. - less anxiety being in IRC than in class - more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure) - more communication with other students and teachers - automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly

cblades 7y ago
You didn't claim they weren't, but I just want to point out how each of those points is very, very subjective. For me: - I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material. - I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time. - I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person. - Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.
- ghaff 7y ago
  The main thing MOOCs do well is a solved problem with or without MOOCs--namely lecture videos. Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale. >Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I concur with boards being useless in general. It's too slow, not predictable. That's why I liked the moocs IRC channels. It was a live place where we could discuss things and resolves issues quickly.
7y ago

ashtonkem 7y ago

College has never gone through an event like this at the scale it currently is at. The idea that every American should attend college is a relatively new one; during the last pandemic in America only a tiny percentage of Americans went to college.

pharke 7y ago

I think there is a lot of value in learning in the same place that others are learning. You have a set schedule, you have people to discuss the material with, you can learn from other students, you gain experience working with peers in a group. That being said, all of this can be done without the actual institution of college as it now exists. If you could organize a small group of people that want to learn the same material then all you need is a place to meet. The only things lacking then would be access to the professor and access to a lab but those have solutions as well, you can look for someone who has already graduated from a similar program at a high level or someone working in the field and ask them if they could work with the group or answer questions and for lab work you can search out a hacker space or other community group that has the required materials or maybe split the cost of buying the equipment with your group. I'll admit there's a hard limit to how far this will go, graduates != experienced educators and some equipment will only exist at universities or research institutions but I'm pretty sure that 80% of what is currently done at college could be done in a coffee shop with good wifi.

jibolash 7y ago

> There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which is hard virtually. Maybe even this is not that hard. People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"

4weekoldroses 7y ago

How much of Harvard and MIT's catalogs are actually online in their entirety? (incl. textual resources, coursework, answers, etc.) IIRC it was more like a few handfuls of introductory courses.

KoftaBob 7y ago

As many have said, the bulk of the value of going to college is in the signaling they're able to provide. You're paying (overpaying in my opinion) for the infrastructure they've put in place to adequately assess your abilities in a way that employers can trust. Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.

gumby 7y ago

When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were enough)

ghaff 7y ago
Yeah, the original concept of OCW wasn't really as materials directly for "end users" at all. I imagine this also helped sell the concept; "people like our current students aren't even the audience for OCW." Over time, OCW has added more things like video lectures as video became cheaper and more ubiquitous but it never had a stated objective of being a course in a box for students to consume directly. A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago

>the networking, friends, social aspect The what?

munchbunny 7y ago

I think the college experience will survive precisely because the value add is the social aspect and the cross-pollination that comes from being near tons of people in lots of fields working on interesting things. Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes. In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.

dehrmann 7y ago

> what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.

davesque 7y ago

> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? Ivy league and other high end colleges are much more a brand than they are a product.