9 ms·

Professor Galloway also said: --- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject

Professor Galloway also said: --- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. --- There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years. But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.

chongli 6y ago
I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place. Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.
- DataWorker 6y ago
  Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.
- take_a_breath 6y ago
  ==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.== You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class. Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.
- geofft 6y ago
  This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly (re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as much value as they thought. What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those (and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    >This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. This is difficult for them to do so, due to stupid laws. If they had a hiring exam, and it happened to show a certain race performing worse on it, they would get sued for racism and lose. So instead, they just do the safe thing, and let collages filter out the undesirables for them.
    - geofft 6y ago
      I believe this isn't true in the US at least for the following reasons: - Many employers do in fact have hiring exams: see Triplebyte, HackerRank, etc. in our own industry, but also civil service exams etc. - Colleges themselves rely on exams (like the SAT) with known racial disparities in scoring for admission. - Colleges completion rates vary by race. So one would think that employers would already be sued for racism if that were possible. (But, perhaps the argument is that employers want to filter people by race, and they wouldn't be able to do so as easily with a hiring exam as via indirect means like recruiting from certain colleges.)
throwaway20485 6y ago
Or tantamount to an institution trying to preserve the actual quality and value of the education by avoiding grade inflation and watering down of material. Many homeless shelters have standards and will reject people who are a threat to the quality of their environment - there really are students who are the (learning) equivalent. This is a hard problem. But the mantra "scale education" ignores the quality side, and somebody who is shuffled through a "scaled" experience without personally investing and then given whatever credential at the end is still not actually competitive for a job and isn't being done any favors - they've just invested a lot of time in something without much personal value. What's worse, they've diluted the perception and thus value of the educational experience for anyone else who attended the same institution, even those who did take it seriously and learn. People still send rejections for bad reasons (ego, etc.), and the cherry-picked 85/87% example seems illustrative of that. But the answer to education isn't scale - it's quality and specialization. Not everyone really wants an academic experience, as anybody who has spent serious time at a school can attest to (throwaway because I'm in that group).
- m0zg 6y ago
  Going to have to disagree. High school education in the US (and I suspect in many other countries) is done by folks some of whom shouldn't be allowed within 300 yards of a high school. I'm seeing it play out with my own kid. Math and chemistry teachers sucks beyond belief this year (and they can't be fired for bad performance - unions), so we hired tutors who fill in over Skype. This happens every year, with different subjects. This is not something a lot of other people can afford to do. Do you reject all those folks for "quality" reasons? Or do you admit the reality that the expensive US high school system is not where it needs to be and try to salvage kids harmed by it by letting more people in and offering remedial classes? You can still maintain quality by doing exams later and getting rid of people who can't pull their weight. Where I have problem is when they won't even give people a chance, even though doing so is technically possible in year 2020, through university administered MOOCs and such.
  - throwaway20485 6y ago
    There are absolutely terrible problems of inequality through nearly all levels and areas of society. Unequal opportunities, inherited economics, social class - these things harm lots of lives. But no, it is not realistic to expect higher education to magically fix all of this at the end of the pipeline by simply having a wider mouth. That's going to/already has significantly harmed the actual value (and signaling value) of a higher degree. It just doesn't fix the problem to more widely apply a treatment that only works when certain prerequisites are in place - competitive programs look for those prior experiences because they really do prepare you for deeper study. There of course should be (and are) undergraduate institutions that are not that competitive, whose charter is to educate those with relatively less opportunity earlier in life. The 85/87% numbers in the original parent comment however suggest that they are discussing either a competitive department or graduate program within a university - and their charter is and should be to advance the truth and quality of their field. In other words - yes, give folks a chance. But don't expect higher education to fix a bunch of upstream socioeconomic problems (try to get primary education fairer first), and "give folks a chance" means "broad access to general undergraduate education" (and then still some standards, i.e. being willing to fail folks or guide them to alternatives), not "open all the gates to everything and scale it up."
staysaasy 6y ago
This is especially tragic given the variation in career opportunities from different colleges. Many of the most highly compensated, high-upside careers are basically only accessible to graduates of top-tier institutions. Particularly in consulting and finance. In my experience talent is way more evenly distributed than the recruiting practices of some industries would indicate. The best people whom I've worked with went to a mix of extremely fancy and very ordinary colleges. A few didn't go to college at all. It's a real shame.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 6y ago
If what you need is an infrastructure for distributing lectures and grading exams, a university is overkill. The real function of a university is community. Communities that concentrate serious students and expect high performance from them are different in important and desirable ways from randomly sampled groups of 18-year-olds.

chongli 6y ago

I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place. Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.

DataWorker 6y ago
Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.
take_a_breath 6y ago
==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.== You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class. Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.
geofft 6y ago
This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly (re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as much value as they thought. What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those (and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).
- tryptophan 6y ago
  >This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. This is difficult for them to do so, due to stupid laws. If they had a hiring exam, and it happened to show a certain race performing worse on it, they would get sued for racism and lose. So instead, they just do the safe thing, and let collages filter out the undesirables for them.
  - geofft 6y ago
    I believe this isn't true in the US at least for the following reasons: - Many employers do in fact have hiring exams: see Triplebyte, HackerRank, etc. in our own industry, but also civil service exams etc. - Colleges themselves rely on exams (like the SAT) with known racial disparities in scoring for admission. - Colleges completion rates vary by race. So one would think that employers would already be sued for racism if that were possible. (But, perhaps the argument is that employers want to filter people by race, and they wouldn't be able to do so as easily with a hiring exam as via indirect means like recruiting from certain colleges.)

throwaway20485 6y ago

Or tantamount to an institution trying to preserve the actual quality and value of the education by avoiding grade inflation and watering down of material. Many homeless shelters have standards and will reject people who are a threat to the quality of their environment - there really are students who are the (learning) equivalent. This is a hard problem. But the mantra "scale education" ignores the quality side, and somebody who is shuffled through a "scaled" experience without personally investing and then given whatever credential at the end is still not actually competitive for a job and isn't being done any favors - they've just invested a lot of time in something without much personal value. What's worse, they've diluted the perception and thus value of the educational experience for anyone else who attended the same institution, even those who did take it seriously and learn. People still send rejections for bad reasons (ego, etc.), and the cherry-picked 85/87% example seems illustrative of that. But the answer to education isn't scale - it's quality and specialization. Not everyone really wants an academic experience, as anybody who has spent serious time at a school can attest to (throwaway because I'm in that group).

m0zg 6y ago
Going to have to disagree. High school education in the US (and I suspect in many other countries) is done by folks some of whom shouldn't be allowed within 300 yards of a high school. I'm seeing it play out with my own kid. Math and chemistry teachers sucks beyond belief this year (and they can't be fired for bad performance - unions), so we hired tutors who fill in over Skype. This happens every year, with different subjects. This is not something a lot of other people can afford to do. Do you reject all those folks for "quality" reasons? Or do you admit the reality that the expensive US high school system is not where it needs to be and try to salvage kids harmed by it by letting more people in and offering remedial classes? You can still maintain quality by doing exams later and getting rid of people who can't pull their weight. Where I have problem is when they won't even give people a chance, even though doing so is technically possible in year 2020, through university administered MOOCs and such.
- throwaway20485 6y ago
  There are absolutely terrible problems of inequality through nearly all levels and areas of society. Unequal opportunities, inherited economics, social class - these things harm lots of lives. But no, it is not realistic to expect higher education to magically fix all of this at the end of the pipeline by simply having a wider mouth. That's going to/already has significantly harmed the actual value (and signaling value) of a higher degree. It just doesn't fix the problem to more widely apply a treatment that only works when certain prerequisites are in place - competitive programs look for those prior experiences because they really do prepare you for deeper study. There of course should be (and are) undergraduate institutions that are not that competitive, whose charter is to educate those with relatively less opportunity earlier in life. The 85/87% numbers in the original parent comment however suggest that they are discussing either a competitive department or graduate program within a university - and their charter is and should be to advance the truth and quality of their field. In other words - yes, give folks a chance. But don't expect higher education to fix a bunch of upstream socioeconomic problems (try to get primary education fairer first), and "give folks a chance" means "broad access to general undergraduate education" (and then still some standards, i.e. being willing to fail folks or guide them to alternatives), not "open all the gates to everything and scale it up."

staysaasy 6y ago

This is especially tragic given the variation in career opportunities from different colleges. Many of the most highly compensated, high-upside careers are basically only accessible to graduates of top-tier institutions. Particularly in consulting and finance. In my experience talent is way more evenly distributed than the recruiting practices of some industries would indicate. The best people whom I've worked with went to a mix of extremely fancy and very ordinary colleges. A few didn't go to college at all. It's a real shame.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

closeparen 6y ago

If what you need is an infrastructure for distributing lectures and grading exams, a university is overkill. The real function of a university is community. Communities that concentrate serious students and expect high performance from them are different in important and desirable ways from randomly sampled groups of 18-year-olds.