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I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

• lokar 5y ago
  One thing that would help with the standardized test issue would be to set a threshold (based on what data show is needed to do well in the program) and have a random lottery of everyone who meets that bar.
  • oatmeal_croc 5y ago
    Random lotteries for people meeting bars is a terrible idea. Look at the H1b wreck we have today where bodyshop companies exploit the system by gaming the lottery. Not to mention the stress, uncertainty and powerlessness of the actual applicants.
    • lokar 5y ago
      There would not really be a backlog. You pick the best school you get into, just like today. And it's already very uncertain now.
  • ceeplusplus 5y ago
    That's exactly what TJ HS (top 1 HS in the US) tried to do to reduce their Asian representation, because Asians were "overrepresented". Standardized tests are a better solution than "holistic" admissions, which bias heavily for students who can afford to go to expensive summer camps, competitions, and volunteer in poor countries. At least standardized tests can be studied for even if you're poor.
    • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      There are entire high schools in the New Orleans area whose average scores on standardized tests exceed all but 2-3 students at any public high school in the area. Having people with experience who know the answers because they can understand and teach the problem at a fundamental level is vastly better than any handout workbook.
      • ceeplusplus 5y ago
        Or they have kids whose parents have much greater respect for education and work ethic than other high schools. I got a 99th percentile score on the SAT with just the typical prep books you find on Amazon (which I pirated) and self study and reflection on mistakes. If you keep blaming the system instead of holding people accountable for their own failures those underperforming high schools you mention will never become top scorers.
• 0898 5y ago
  Some kid is going to stand up and say: “You can throw me in jail or cancel my degree but I’m not paying my student debt… who’s with me?” And then the whole house of cards that is higher education collapses.
  • beaned 5y ago
    Someone currently in college told me that if you just don't pay them, they simply start forgiving then. Unofficially. I don't know how true that is.
    • gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
      I pay the bare minimum payment and let inflation forgive them ;)
  • 015UUZn8aEvW 5y ago
    No, because the debt is owed to the government or to private lenders. Once the money is issued from the lender to the school for tuition, the school has no further exposure to any risk. Total scam.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    my first wife was older than me, and she never paid her student loans. She never had credit of any substance for the rest of her life (this was long ago and I know this is true).
  • kube-system 5y ago
    About 1 million people do that every year in the US. None of them are thrown in jail or have their degrees cancelled. Those working in finance are well aware of the concept of a default. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/10/01/student-loans-default/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/10/01/student...
  • MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Let me translate that for you: "I'm not as special as I thought I was and I was too lazy to figure out whether I could pay back what I borrowed even though I had the entire freaking internet to look that up for myself, so I'm going to throw a big fit." Nobody cares. Pay your debts or don't, but it's not going to change anything. That's not even civil disobedience. That's just entitlement. I'm sure that'll work out great when they need to buy a house, or a car, or get a loan if they need to pay for extra medical expenses. The entire system is an abusive racket, but let's not pretend that people don't have options.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  It seems all of these terrible things that pervert the experience are all driven by tenure. Everybody wants tenure, so they're willing to kill themselves with overwork and ignore their students trying to get it.
• Maximus9000 5y ago
  more easily read here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505597901011005442.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505597901011005442.html
• option 5y ago
  As a hiring manager at one of tech firms, I can confirm that I can’t care less where you completed your deep learning courses - at Berkeley or on Coursera. Your GitHub profile matters so much more (especially so if you are fresh out of college).
  • clusterhacks 5y ago
    How about some numbers? Applicants with "traditional" degree (BS/MS/PhD) hired versus applicants with alternative credentials hired?
  • jimbob45 5y ago
    In two years of a job search, I had two firms actually look at my GitHub. It’s not a realistic path to getting hired, as much as hiring managers want you to believe otherwise.
• spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Seems like a pretty unremarkable collection of surface level observations if you ask me
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Try hiring someone without a degree in healthcare: someone's life is on the line, not some rich man's toy.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      Healthcare demonstrates the other extreme of the problem in my experience, where entrance to the field is gatekept by the medical education system to ensure that there's not an over supply of professionals that would put downward pressure on existing salaries.
      • tablespoon 5y ago
        > Healthcare demonstrates the other extreme of the problem in my experience, where entrance to the field is gatekept by the medical education system to ensure that there's not an over supply of professionals that would put downward pressure on existing salaries. That's not a bad thing (to a point) when the entry-level qualification takes a massive amount of time, intense effort, and money to get; it's very important that they manage it so there's no oversupply. If you don't, then you'll have disasters like US legal education has been.
        • spywaregorilla 5y ago
          Entry level qualifications probably shouldn't require that though; especially money. Society needs a lot of doctors. It doesn't need any english lit PhDs. Not to say the latter isn't without benefit.
    • oceanplexian 5y ago
• anotherhue 5y ago
  Twitter 'threads' are bad and people should feel badly for creating/posting them.
  • shagie 5y ago
    I nearly completely agree with you. The one thing that a twitter "threat" enables that is poorly supported in other formats is the ability to have comments on a particular sentence. The worst part of the twitter as a long form platform is when a single idea extends beyond the limitations of a single tweet.
    • trentgreene 5y ago
      I see your point about commenting on sentences, but would also argue that academic writing provides a better model for this via quotations and references
      • shagie 5y ago
        Yep, but there's no place that provides the combination of user base, potential for engagement, and commenting on sentences. Long form is a much better format for comprehensive ideas, but the "this is something I want to comment on" isn't there and the engagement on the comment and comments on the comments rarely exists in those formats. Medium's "highlight" and "respond" functionality is a rather poor implementation of that desired ability (the discoverability beyond the "top highlight" is difficult for other users) ... and then there's that whole "upgrade to read more" problem. And beyond that, there's the bit that twitter has a large number of users - trying to traverse Wordpress pings and comment moderation... ugh. Unfortunately, twitter is the best place that offers users, aggregation, no $ needed, comment on sentence, and the opportunity for engagement of followers.
    • trutannus 5y ago
      That also causes replies to sections of text taken out of context to get more traction than they should, feeding the "dunk" culture on Twitter. I'm not sure being able to reply to and highlight an out of context chunk of text is a useful thing for communication at all really.
• wpietri 5y ago
  This is kind of a weird mix of points. Ignoring his political axe-grinding, I think the value of a college degree is increasingly in question for many fields because the price has risen wildly for decades without a corresponding increase in market value. (Except perhaps for elite-institution degrees, which are more about the brand and the network than what people actually learn.) I think we haven't seen at least a partial collapse only because most American companies are bad at hiring, bad at investing in workers, and bad at keeping them. But imagine a company where programmers are happy and tend to say for years. That company might do just as well, or perhaps better, running an in-house boot camp and apprenticeship program as by hiring new grads.
  • zdragnar 5y ago
    Price and value are decoupled for college degrees. STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students, and many liberal arts degrees are not, by themselves, economically valuable (I said this as someone with just such a degree).
    • itake 5y ago
      > STEM students are subsidized by liberal arts students Can you provide more context for this? How is the cost of teaching a STEM student higher than the cost of a liberal arts student? The classrooms are roughly the same. STEM student labs might be more expensive to manage, but that equipment is/(can be?) funded by research grants.
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        STEM professors have to be paid a lot more than liberal arts professors (due to competition for STEM talent). Equipment for teaching isn’t covered under research grants, but might come from overhead on those grants, but more likely from donations (from big corps), grants, or tuition.
        • google234123 5y ago
          Business professors are paid even more.
• unpopularopp 5y ago
  What's the word when people with trust and experience on one field suddenly trusted when they talk about other topics too? Saw this a lot with COVID but this is a good example too.
  • anonporridge 5y ago
    Some kind of mix between appeal to authority and false equivalence?
  • ulrashida 5y ago
    But.. he has a blue check mark!
  • dorkwood 5y ago
    Maybe the Halo Effect? "The halo effect (sometimes called the halo error) is the tendency for positive impressions of a person, company, brand or product in one area to positively influence one's opinion or feelings in other areas." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect
  • jpeloquin 5y ago
    Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect? Although that's more about how news and social media are unreliable sources of information on all topics. I've heard "Engineer's Disease" or "Engineer Syndrome" used to describe the tendency of so-called technical people to think their expertise generalizes to topics in which they have no experience.
• _Microft 5y ago
  On Nitter: https://nitter.eu/sama/status/1505597901011005442 https://nitter.eu/sama/status/1505597901011005442
• mulcahey 5y ago
  Few thoughts 1) The subreddit of my alma mater has been full of posts venting anxiety, depression, trouble with financial aid, trouble making friends, frustration with administration, etc for years now, exacerbated by COVID. While that may not be representative of the whole undergrad population, I can't help but be reminded of Thiel's line from Zero to One "Why are we doing this to ourselves?" 2) I'm now seeing not only friends without bachelors degrees get well-paying CS jobs with "engineer" titles & equity comp, but even some in mechanical engineering! 3) When I was in undergrad, half of my upper div classes were so abysmal that I figured the staff who cared enough to keep the enterprise going were fighting a losing battle. A complete rewrite would be better than an in place one. "Death is the best invention of life" and we should try the creative destruction of capitalism/evolution instead of holding the oldest institutions in the highest regard. I don't have much of a clue what the future will look like by the time I have kids of college age, but I do not think particularly highly of what we've got now.
  • moab 5y ago
    These kind of prognostications /opinions are easily falsifiable by talking to your coworkers that went to other universities. Most of the top-25 schools have upper-div CS classes that are nothing like what you're taking about, with both faculty and TAs putting in enormous effort to make sure that courses are accessible and intellectually stimulating.
    • mulcahey 5y ago
      I went to a top 25 CS school. Half my upper div lectures had ~5% attendance.
      • moab 5y ago
        Strikes me as very anomalous. 5% attendance? Anyway, bad idea to draw conclusions from one university…
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• orzig 5y ago
  I didn't see any statements about what will be, just what should be. The sort-of counter-example is that "Tech jobs [..] are increasingly willing to hire with no degree". But strange that he of all people didn't add a statistic on that. Am I missing something?
• nynx 5y ago
  It’s really too late for me to drop out (graduating in the fall), but it’s something I’ve put a lot of thought into in the past. Really, the main thing that’s had value for me has been my senior thesis. Most classes, even high-level engineering classes, are a waste of time.
• ab_testing 5y ago
  I don't like Twitter threads but I agree with Sam Altman in this case. Waiving student loan debt but not resolving the root cause will give a clear signal to colleges - Increase tuition as much as you want because the taxpayers will again pick up the tab in a few years .
  • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Creditors would be on the hook - not colleges - if students default.
    • WillPostForFood 5y ago
      Taxpayers are the creditors for 92.6% student loans. https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics#:~:text=While%2030%25%20of%20undergraduates%20borrow,92.6%25%20of%20student%20loan%20debt https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-statistics#:~:te....
      • walkhour 5y ago
        Thank you for this data
• 999900000999 5y ago
  Ehh. College is a net good, but do it on the cheap. Unless you plan to attend a top law school, no one cares about your undergrad. Community College students can still transfer into UCLA or other top schools. Hell, community college was good for me since I was able to take out student loans and get the hell away from my family. No more evictions for me! Even if you don't finish college, it's a great deal. I was at 6 figures before I graduated.
  • cudgy 5y ago
    > I was at 6 figures before I graduated. Very few degrees offer this type of wage at graduation. Not everyone wants to build software. Although I agree with your general point to attend cheaper schools until it matters (eg graduate level and want to be a professor or lawyer).
    • 999900000999 5y ago
      My degree has nothing to do with my career. If you have horrible family like my own college is one of the very few options you have. If anything the FASA process needs to do more to accommodate people who don't really have families. The calls for student loan forgiveness ignore the good these loans do. At 18 you can do so many stupid things, taking out a loan isn't the worst. If that loan gets you put of a volitile situation max it out
• mach1ne 5y ago
  I don't see the point of cancelling student debt. It's obvious it's not fixing the problem. Probably the only reason it's even on the table is the fact that it's not stepping on any toes.
  • yucky 5y ago
    It's only on the table because it's an attempt to buy votes.
  • ergocoder 5y ago
    If I had student debt, I would scream at the top of my lungs too. It is no surprise that many scream about it.
• Jerrrry 5y ago
  The government should pull out of student grants and loans. Unfortunately, the "double pell" movement means people paying out of pocket are soon going to have to pay double. What a coincidence, that the average degree costs the average student loan package. Stop subsidizing education. Let the market forces actually allow for a fair price discovery, or else that college degree is as valuable in a sense as crypto is...its intrinsic value - use case - job improvement prospects, multiplied by a coefficient of speculation. I say this as someone who has had a massive impact on the student aid lifecycle, and yet didn't go to college myself, because ironically, wasn't able to fill out the FAFSA form.
• blakesterz 5y ago
  "But cancelling all student debt and then continuing to issue new debt to students that the university fails (i.e. by not putting them in a position to make enough money to easily pay it back) doesn't make sense." That's one thing that never made any sense to me. I get it. I really do. But I've never seen any compelling, realistic answer to "And then what?". This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. I get it, I really, really do. But... then what? What about the next decade? It's not getting any better. The most important word in this is "realistic".
  • okaram 5y ago
    > This only solves the problem of the HUGE number of people with crushing loan debt now. That's a big problem solved. We can also solve other problems. Nothing requires us to solve all of them at the same time.
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      But if solving this problem takes a huge amount of money, and the problem is going to keep coming, then actually solving it takes more than money. It takes changing things so that the problem quits showing up. You might get everyone to pony up the money to bail everyone out who is currently mired in college debt. It's a much tougher sell to get us to pony up the money forever.
• crackercrews 5y ago
  Definitely agree that removing the SAT appears to be related to the upcoming supreme court case about affirmative action. COVID was a good reason to delay it for a couple years. But schools are pushing it out further. That makes no sense. It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids? Sam mentions that schools could down-weight the SAT but should still consider it. Why don't schools want to do that? My guess: if they have mediocre scores on record for a kid, then admitting him means reporting those scores to USNews. They'd rather not know that the kid has a score that would bring down their average.
  • tessierashpool 5y ago
    that is entirely a guess, though. there's actual documented evidence of colleges admitting less Asian-Americans and Jews than the test scores of either group would suggest, and Altman refers to this phenomenon in the thread. > It seems the SAT is increasingly considered "racist" because it reveals racial disparities in learning. What's next? Get rid of the driver's license test because it turns that white kids pass it at a higher rate than black kids? the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith.
    • crackercrews 5y ago
      > the SAT's a way of laundering discrepancies in generational wealth, which is indeed due to racist public policy as well as racist private actions. it may be intended not that way, but that's how it functions. Wealthy students do score better than poor students on the SAT. Do you know who also scores well? Students who study very hard, including poor students. If you get rid of the SAT then the poor students will find it harder to stand out. The rich kids will have ghost-written essays and extracurriculars. They won't be hurt at all. > so what's next would be removing other methods of laundering racist public policy and racist private action. probably drivers' licenses would not show up on that list, and your assertion that it might is so ridiculous that it's hard to believe you're examining this topic with good faith. I have never heard someone say that disparate impacts only matter if there is a laundering of wealth or public policies or private actions. Where have you seen this distinction drawn?
• nickysielicki 5y ago
  > Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. What do you tell the upper middle class families that didn't buy a bigger house or pad their investment accounts so that they could help put 3 of their kids through schools? My parents spent at least $200k on undergrad education between me and my siblings (UVA, Cornell, UW-Madison). Did they make the wrong decision? Should they have saddled us with debt? At 10% (ie: S&P AAR) that would net $600,000! When America becomes a place where you're punished for having invested in your children, it becomes a place where you will no longer want to live.
  • alanbernstein 5y ago
    You know, I've asked this exact question before, but I've changed my mind. Here is what I'd tell them: "Congratulations on being wealthy enough to afford tuition. Try to be considerate of the people less fortunate than you."
    • nickysielicki 5y ago
      If it was $60k of opportunity cost I might be willing to accept it as a progressive tax and let bygones be bygones. But $600k likely represents half of their net worth. "Considerate" only goes so far.
      • alanbernstein 5y ago
        Yeah, $60k is closer to the amount that I was complaining about having already paid. But you're not wrong; I'm just trying to keep the greater good in mind. How about: "Try to consider how much you and your family will benefit from the improvements made possible to society and the economy by redirecting billions of dollars from loan payments to other spending."
  • tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    Red herring. Subject of TFA is the value of school. This example family wasted $200k on a low-value thing that only seems to exist because companies are terrible at recruiting. It's worse for someone who has to go in a lifetime of debt, but ideally neither the rich nor poor family would have to waste their money.
• Tretiotrr 5y ago
  In Germany you study for free. There was a video (perhaps even from kurzgesagt) which describes how critical it is for our society to allow as many people as easy access to knowledge as possible and not only for obvious reasons but also to increase the chance for all of us that the hidden genius is finding a cure for cancer. You can even study for free in Germany as an non German. You know what happens? Those people might stay in Germany and make Germany a better country. Imagine a world were we compete globally with the best education system. Let's allow more people to shape our future.
  • frogperson 5y ago
    If they made college free in America it would be severely underfunded and suffer all the same problems as American high school. If there is no money in something, then it's assumed there is no value. It's the American way.
    • webmaven 5y ago
      > If they made college free in America it would be severely underfunded and suffer all the same problems as American high school. You would only get those same problems if you made college mandatory, as well as free. A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities.
      • nebula8804 5y ago
        >A real commitment to a policy of free tertiary education would also expand the availability of trade schools not just universities. This is part of the proposal of progressives. They always emphasized the freedom for a student to choose between trade school or community college, and then move on to a public 4 year school if they chose to do so.
    • seibelj 5y ago
      No, it would be extraordinarily funded, but the money would not go to the students. NYC now spends over $30k per year, per student https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ny-school-spending-results-20211126-qqw55a5eozg2bh6ptdzcm5zr3e-story.html https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ny-school-spendi... Public education in the US is the most well-funded per student you can find anywhere. Yet somehow it doesn't translate into top-tier teachers nor top-tier outcomes. It's almost like giving huge amounts of money to unaccountable bureaucrats doesn't solve problems.
• mind-blight 5y ago
  I'm concerned that the majority of "should we fix college or should we circumvent college" conversations don't bring up one of the scariest parts of our current economy: STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. All of the conversations I've seen implicitly assume that this is good, and that the solution to farmer workers (or other low paid workers) escaping poverty is to train them as software developers. We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option
  • loosescrews 5y ago
    I think the piece that you are missing is automation. A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated and likely will be automated in the coming decades. If you are college age, you should be planning for a more automated future.
    • randomdata 5y ago
      > A large portion of non-STEM jobs (including most farm jobs) can be automated Most farm jobs are STEM. The non-STEM aspects of agriculture were mostly automated away centuries ago. You'll notice that farming went from ~90% of the workforce to ~2% over that time. There exists some remaining small scale stuff that hasn't justified the cost of automation, but at the small scale it will be a long time before automation does pencil out. Robots don't work for free.
  • gruez 5y ago
    >STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. >We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  The elephant in the room is that college doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job. I'm not talking about the obvious exceptions like medicine or law (though even that can be done as a conversion rather than an undergrad degree) or anything else where you literally need the paper that says you can do it. I'm also not talking about becoming a researcher, where obvious you need to know a bit of X to become a professor of X. I'm talking about the vast number of degrees that are not job specific. Business, economics, history, literature, and so on with humanities, but also math, chemistry, physics, and biology. There is no real reason an employer would care what you studied, because as a new graduate your job is to learn the business. Whether you were interested in one thing or another in college doesn't matter much, the main line is between math-tech stuff and not-math-tech stuff. Employers who reckon their work is techie will gravitate towards those graduates, while others will be open to anyone. All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business. Of course the problem is there's plenty of people who instead of learning Krebs cycle could just go directly into finance or accounting or any number of jobs without jumping through the hoops. The issue is that college has become a destination for so many smart kids, it's hard to imagine a smart kid who skips it. So absolutely everyone feels they need to go to college, and absolutely every employer thinks they need to hire just college grads. In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.
  • gruez 5y ago
    >All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business. >[...] >In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs. What's the alternative? Like you said yourself, employers want some sort of signal that you're reasonably smart and can put the work in. You can't really replace that with a 6 month bootcamp.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• raincom 5y ago
  HYP (Harvard, Yale and Princeton), and top tier law schools (Harvard, Yale, Stanford), top tier b schools (Harvard and Stanford) still control the whole thing. Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP. Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and top tier consulting companies still go for elite colleges. Why? That is the path to c-level positions (not leetcode). Same thing for big law. Same thing goes for Washington consensus (the cesspool of Beltway), where pedigree matters.
  • mgh2 5y ago
    Is it pedigrees that matter or what these signal? Ethics aside, I rather have a smart person in charge rather than the opposite
    • wpietri 5y ago
      What they signal? Like generational wealth and elite connections? [1] I have definitely seen hiring managers lean very hard on pedigree so they didn't have to do the actual work of evaluating candidates. It was basically the same deal with a lot of certifications, like Scrum/Agile and Java certs. I also think that your bucketing people such that Harvard = smart and state school = "the opposite" is a great example of the problem. Personally, I'd always rather work with somebody who has had to work their way up, as they tend to have a more balanced perspective. [1] E.g.: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-more-than-one-third-legacy.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/07/harvards-freshman-class-is-m...
      • mgh2 5y ago
        Nobody said anything about state schools - focus on the main argument.
      • mgh2 5y ago
        Nope, intelligence matters at the end if that person works hard too, there is no ceiling unlike the opposite. Intelligence or/and hard work alone can only carry you so far, there are so many other factors that lead to success (ex: luck) As a business, you bet your risks against the person who has been vetted vs. the unproven one.
• dgan 5y ago
  > "I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed..." What??
  • amluto 5y ago
    I suspect many people would like to think that if they looked different they may have had a somewhat harder time succeeding but would have done so anyway.
• ThrustVectoring 5y ago
  One of the underappreciated parts of student loans is that every debt is someone else's financial asset, and this usually nets out to financing the transfer of real goods and services to retirees. If you stop squeezing young adults, you have to squeeze the retirees that own their assets. Inflation, asset prices going down, pension benefits reduced, tax increases, etc - reducing student loan amounts doesn't affect the real economy, so easing up on material constraints means more real consumption there instead of elsewhere.
• kistanod 5y ago
  It's still important to have doctors/nurses/engineers that went through rigorous tenure. The problem lies with inflated tuition costs for a useless degree like gender studies, where after graduating college, your options are 1) drown in debt 2) continue the cycle of being in academia (masters/PhD) and justifying the existence of this system.
• jdrc 5y ago
  > What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it. Think we also need an alternative to schools.
• nimithryn 5y ago
  Some of these points are correct. College does seem to be providing less value in the US, etc. Maybe some third-tier universities could be in trouble if there's a decline in college attendance. But, "collapsing"? Universities are one of the most long-lived types of institutions known to humankind. Oxford was founded in 1096. I suspect they will be around quite a lot longer.
  • manuelabeledo 5y ago
    Oxford is in the UK, though. US universities famously have different priorities, compared to their European counterparts.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • dmurray 5y ago
    I don't think he's suggesting universities will go away completely. A 10% or 30% or 90% in US university attendance/revenue/headcount over a period of a few years would objectively be a collapse no matter how well Oxford or MIT continues to thrive.
    • nimithryn 5y ago
      I mean, his ideas for replacing universities seem oriented at the elite institutions: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505599701864701954 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505599701864701954 TBH I don't think it's clear what he's suggesting.
  • antattack 5y ago
    Just as capitalism fails to account for economic externalities, it also fails to account for education helping people make good choices for themselves and the country, including voting. There's often unaccounted value, in a democratic society, for people to be educated. Also, just because someone is doing a menial work it does not mean that they should not have a access to higher education. Especially since there's not enough of higher valued jobs for everyone and to assure worker mobility.
• 4oo4 5y ago
  Really surprised no one has brought up that admissions are dropping (especially among men), and that almost all universities are built on the poverty labor of captive educators. Meanwhile administrators take all the money. Case in point: https://futurism.com/the-byte/university-professor-unpaid https://futurism.com/the-byte/university-professor-unpaid
  • judge2020 5y ago
    This is capitalism in general as of the last ~30 years. Profits are continuously rising, with investors and senior management taking the largest checks home so they too can become small time accredited investors of their own 8,9-digit net worths. To add, covid was the perfect scapegoat to shifting liability to in order to move tons of wealth higher up and away from the lower and middle classes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/business/ceo-pay-compensation-stock.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/business/ceo-pay-compensa...
    • oversocialized 5y ago
      [dead]
• kube-system 5y ago
  “US college educations” consist mostly of schools that aren’t highly selective schools that discriminate against Asians. Most students aren’t going to private schools of any kind, let alone highly selective ones.
  • jopsen 5y ago
    You just saying that most students don't go to an icy league school, right? :)
    • kube-system 5y ago
      Mostly, but there are other selective schools. Add all of those together and it’s still a tiny percentage of what is going on in higher education. Most kids go to state schools.
• WBrentWilliams 5y ago
  My careful reading of the facts (disclosure: my daytime gig is making the wheels in a university's student records system whir) * Forgiving student debt is an endless political cycle, promising to piss off anyone who has either paid off their large debt without forgiveness (raises hand - five figures (think 1990s luxury car) between my wife and I) or didn't acquire the debt in the first place (self-funded or scholarships). * Standardized test scores going away: Read the fine print (I implemented this policy in code). The test scores went away for admissions. You can get in without standardized test scores. However, public and private scholarships are still tied to standardized test scores. Funding agreements (I was involved in maintaining the university's implementation of these) from private donors or public sources have mostly not been altered. Rhetorical: Are standardized tests really going away? * Tech hiring without degrees: Culture and HR fit is important here. Does HR, protecting the company from itself, quietly screen and discard resumes without necessary keywords? This is an effective way to remove non-degree holding candidates. * Alternatives: Yes, we (in the United States) do need them. We have needed them for at least 30 years. Politically, all we ever really seem to get are NEETs and High-Schools-With-Smoking-Areas. I like that Mr. Altman's thinking of alternatives. Please share them. I want to see a successful implementation. My job, and the way I define it, relies on making it possible for as many to dream as possible. I support widening the number of paths to dream as possible. I believe that this is not a zero-sum game. As for price, there is already an economic force that will cause interesting swings ahead. In my circles, it is called a demographic cliff. My university is already seeing it and has made short term changes. I foresee many small universities and colleges closing and merging. Eventually, when shrinkage cannot happen any longer, the price of services (tuition and fees) will be lowered. Just in time for the current administrative overhead to retire.
• tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  Login-wall free link: https://nitter.net/sama/status/1505597901011005442 https://nitter.net/sama/status/1505597901011005442
• dools 5y ago
  Sam Alt-right
• paxys 5y ago
  While all of the points he has made may very well be true to some extent, I fail to see any reasoning for the imminent "collapse" he predicts.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505597901820477441 https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505597901820477441 >Most of all, it's clearly a bad deal for many students, or we wouldn't have the student debt crisis. People keep saying that, and it's not true. The evidence still suggests college is a good deal 1. College loan debt has lower interest rates, more forbearance options and payment plans compared to consumer debt, like credit card or car loan debt. Credit card debt has very high interest rates. There needs to be more outrage about that, not student loan debt, which comparably has better terms. 2.Even adjusted for student loan debt and inflation, college grads today are earning more than than ever compared to non-grads, and compared to past college grads . The college wage premium is wider than ever and shows no signs of narrowing, even with Covid. This premium even applies to non-STEM fields and low-ranking colleges. The rise of online learning and remote learning has not put a dent in the premium. This is not too surprising: college courses, especially in STEM, are more rigorous than online videos/courses; and second, college attendance confers other attributes beyond learning, like contentiousness and maybe even conformity. 3. The college wage premium is 2-fold: higher wages and then higher returns from investing said wages in rapidly appreciating assets like stocks and real estate. The post-2009 bull market is the biggest and longest ever, even adjusted for inflation, for both stocks and real estate. The fed is hellbent on making stocks go up as much as possible, by keeping rates rock bottom and raising them very, very gradually even as inflation rips higher. Most calculations of the college wage premium only look at wages and not returns from investing said wages in the stock market and or real estate. 4. Small biz has high start-up costs and a high failure rate. Sure, if you have rich parents or can get VC backing, maybe give entrepreneurship a shot, but for everyone else, a professional, high-paying job, like at a FANG company, offers a much more reliable, consistent way of making money. Or investing that $ in the stock market. And even many tech founders have college degrees. Dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are more the exception than the norm. There many tons of people who have made 7 or even 8 figures with the college-to-STEM-job route. The FIRE movement is full of such individuals who have amassed large nest eggs in their 20s and 30s by doing this. For these people at least, college was certainty a good deal. 5. High school grads may have a 4-year head start compared to college grads, but this is negated by a higher unemployment rate. 6. What about cost of living in Silicon Valley? That too is not such a big deal (for people in STEM at least). A simple calculation shows that a job that pays $200k still has plenty of discretionary income to invest with, after subtracting expenses. Rent is the biggest expense, but still very small relative to monthly wages for a tech job. Buying a home offers way better returns anyway, and is doable with six figure salary. You can buy a home with 5-15% down. (I am assuming a single person household; costs will obviously go up if children are involved.) https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/12/22/higher-ed-may-be-broken-but-the-alternatives-solutions-are-not-that-great-either/ https://greyenlightenment.com/2021/12/22/higher-ed-may-be-br... >Cancelling student debt is good if it's tied to fixing the problem going forward, which means not offering it, or having the colleges be the guarantor, or ISAs, or something. The problem is that 50% of students not finish college. They get all of the debt of having attended but none of the benefits of graduating. More effort needs to be made screening ppl who are unlikely to finish, as opposed to debt forgiveness. If anyone deserves to have debt forgiveness it's dropouts, who were compelled to go to college but for whatever reason were not suited for it. Student loan forgiveness will not solve this problem. Even if dropouts have their debts forgiven, they should ideally be doing something else.
• juanani 5y ago
• jdauriemma 5y ago
  There was something on the HN front page recently that asserted that the goals of education and capitalism are (paraphrasing from memory) fundamentally at odds with one another. I thought that statement captured the state of things perfectly. All the hand-wringing over “alternatives” to universities will accomplish little if this underlying conflict is not resolved.
• civilized 5y ago
  He mentions that tech is increasingly willing to hire without a degree. I think that's a fascinating trend and it would be super interesting to know the % of jobs in different fields requiring a college degree over time, as well as the % actually employed in the field without a degree.
• xanaxagoras 5y ago
  Note "nearer to collapsing than it appears" can be interpreted to mean "in the recent past" which seems accurate to me. I'd put it sometime around Trump's election - not because of it, but that was a key accelerant.
• imgabe 5y ago
  Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's at the leading edge of research in their field, you want them doing that research, not teaching 18 year old's Newton's laws of motion. And they're mostly not doing that teaching, that gets farmed out to an adjunct paid starvation wages. So the kid who's paying through the nose to attend a top university with the best researchers doesn't get to interact with them much and gets an inferior education compared to one where they hired and properly compensated someone to actually focus on teaching. If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that. Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. We should create dedicated research institutions so researchers don't have to pretend to care about teaching.
  • judge2020 5y ago
    > - minor league sports teams Light data for this: freshman admissions, at least within the state of Georgia, commonly have exemptions made for athletes: https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/ https://investigations.ajc.com/football-admissions/
  • vmception 5y ago
    The first should be trade schools Just so professors dont have to act oblivious as to why students are there, some still revert to “wdym, you should be here for the pursuit of learning” But there is merit to that, the schools reserved for the upper echelon of society (in terms of most coveted exclusive network and access) have been around for like 300 years, they can weather this several decade long meme of inclusion and the coincidental corporate sector that has people convinced they need degrees to access that (and why expanded audiences want to be included in those school’s admissions to begin with) “Hey current Dean and former US Treasury Secretary and cabinet member, remember that time when the proletariat was trying to go here? Are those dark ages going to be on the evaluation?”
• alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > personal essays I've always seen that done in movies, but didn't actually think that was real. In Australia, AFAIK it's all computer ranked based on the performance of your last 2 years of high school - that's it. > personal essay are surely more correlated and more hackable. Exactly.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jmyeet 5y ago
  I'm torn on the subject of student debt because I think some of the blame here belongs with the students and their families. Yes, you can argue that you shouldn't give 18 year olds 6 figures in non-dischargeable debt. That's a valid point. But part of why people get into so much debt I think is because many people are taught from a very young age to "follow your dreams" and that they're special, an exception to the rule. Sure 95% of those who get a PhD in the humanities never get a tenured position but this time it's different. At what point do the people taking out loans in fields with limited earning potential and the parents who fan the flames of this delusion share some of the responsibility? You are not special [1]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CnryN0_bvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CnryN0_bvY
  • warent 5y ago
    Quoting the philosophy of a character who was suffering from a catastrophic mental illness to the point of terrorism and suicide really takes away from your point
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > Sure 95% of those who get a PhD in the humanities never get a tenured position but this time it's different. Why do people think the only valid outcome from a PhD is tenure in an academic institution?
• tonto 5y ago
  not really related to this post, but all the "related tweets" (aka "More Tweets") are from trumpers. not a great look
• cowanon6767 5y ago
  This is demonstrably false - there may be a few edge cases where companies are making degrees optional, but overall the trend is in the opposite direction. (The companies bypassing the degree requirement all have their own very rigorous selection requirements; the number of non-college graduates who can meet the requirements is very small.) Companies are using college diplomas as the new high school - even some help desk jobs prefer college students or recent graduates now. It seems like almost all companies require a college degree for even slightly senior positions - a high school graduate will be very limited in career progression. Degrees are now a necessary but not sufficient condition for most people. As far as price, most U.S. states have an excellent public university system - you would have to be insane to pay private school prices for anything but a top 5 university.
• Izkata 5y ago
  > It seems very clear that elite colleges discriminate against Asian-American students, and that the Supreme Court is going to find this. (One expert said no discrimination would result in around 65% Asian-American admits.) > The fact that this has been so tolerated speaks volumes. Tolerated? It's been encouraged for at least two decades, under the name "affirmative action".
  • tonymet 5y ago
    only “tolerated” because we don’t have actual journalism but instead a PR (propaganda) arm of our kleptocracy . asian communities have been under represented politically. #stopasianhate was a positive turning point to engage asian communities , and we need #stopasiandiscrimination next
  • TameAntelope 5y ago
    I feel like this glosses over the fact that more people than can be admitted are qualified to be admitted to the schools who "discriminate". When the pool of qualified applicants is 3x your available positions, it seems to make sense to me to attempt to match the population makeup of the United States at large when selecting from that pool, since otherwise you're more or less going to do it randomly. Helping one group of people does not mean hurting another group of people; life is not zero sum, and pretending like getting admitted to Harvard or not is the only metric in this conversation is ridiculous. There are approximately zero children, Asian or otherwise, whose only shot is to get into Harvard or not go to college at all. Being denied admission to Harvard due to a luck-of-the-draw is not discrimination, it's a lottery. Sam Altman may have a larger point, but the Harvard discrimination case is not an argument that supports that point.
    • Izkata 5y ago
      A given college can only accept a certain number of students each term. Giving a slot to a less-qualified student necessitates dropping a more-qualified student, making it zero-sum. I'm not talking about Harvard specifically (I don't even know what case you're talking about), this is just the normal state of colleges in the US.
• periphrasis 5y ago
  The problems of higher education not withstanding, I will always be grateful I stumbled into a superb liberal arts education as an undergraduate and I will always feel a little sorry for men like Altman who aren’t even aware that they missed out on anything.
• Fomite 5y ago
  "It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning." College students have been protesting things since well before Sam Altman was born.
• onethought 5y ago
  Doesn't YC (Sam Altman) invest in things like Lambda Code school? Is this not like Ford saying "ICE Vehicles have a long future" - It's clearly bias and its truth has no basis in fact. The "Student Loan" crisis, is a US crisis. Where as the university system is a global one. So you're really saying that the US will stop doing Higher Education, while the rest of the world continues? That feels like a bad move. Is the problem with the US College system an educational one or a financial one? Seems like the latter, which means the solution isn't to stop the former.
• zw123456 5y ago
  Meanwhile... Ballooning Ivy League Endowment Forecasted To Top $1 Trillion By 2048 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/31/ballooning-ivy-league-endowment-forecasted-to-top-1-trillion-by-2048 https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/10/31/bal...
• throwawaycities 5y ago
  I think the writing on the wall is clear regarding student loans. The entire notion of taxpayer funded student loans is a scam on both taxpayers and students. It’s a system that allows the colleges/universities to charge any tuition they want and guarantees there will be an artificial demand. For about a decade at least 1M student loan holders default per year. Long before the defaults reached that high, everyone involved knew that student loans were far outpacing the economic value, and yet not a single college or university stepped up in goodfaith to blow the whistle, they continued to suckle at the tit to the detriment of their own students. Education is supposed to benefit students and the nation as a whole but the ridiculousness of loans has ensured it ruins lives and at >$1.5T in taxpayer funded debt that continues to grow exponentially it is a detriment to the country. Collapse of student loans will of course have an impact of the college/university landscape, but the industry as a whole will not collapse, rather tuition will “collapse”, or come down, to what students can actually afford out of pocket without going into debt. And if the universities/colleges somehow can’t survive on existing taxpayers subsidies from the Dept. of Educations $68B annual budget plus out of pocket tuition rates, then welcome to the real world your university/college is a failed business.
  • rkalla 5y ago
    With the inflation we've seen in the last 24 months do you think the tuition will still come back to earth or just stay put for a decade or more?
    • throwawaycities 5y ago
      Ideally inflation shouldn’t effect education as much as regular goods. For example if I have an apple and you want to buy my apple, at minimum I want to recover my costs because I will be left without an apple. However, if I have knowledge, I can share my knowledge with you freely and now we both have knowledge, I won’t lose my knowledge like the apple. If we don’t abandon the the system of guaranteed government (i.e. taxpayer) student loans, you can be sure their costs will continue to go up just like they went up when their was no inflation, and those costs will just be passed along to students and paid for with debt.
  • 5y ago
• nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  Wow, how does he think it appears? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t consider it a total disaster.
• tptacek 5y ago
  I don't understand why the answer here isn't just to radically increase the supply of college-level education. People always push back on this and say that college is a status signaling mechanism, which is true as far as it goes, but there is clearly a market for even very expensive low-status school (see: all for-profit colleges). All that aside, I don't know that Sam Altman is the most effective person to deliver this message, since it's sort of a cliched thing for someone in his role to say. It's especially cringe-y since he's seasoned his thread with a culture war appeal.
• dimatura 5y ago
  Soon, the ability to do well in leetcode-style tests will be the only qualification needed for a coding job. At the same time, AlphaCode, etc. have shown AI can do well at leetcode. Ergo, AI will soon take all the coding jobs. (/s)
• cercatrova 5y ago
  I highly doubt it will collapse any time soon. People underestimate the level of inertia that exists in institutions even after it's clear they should collapse, even though I'm not certain of colleges having gotten to this point, as they serve many roles that are not simply about learning, such as: - job training (like it or not, college grads are seen more favorably than non-grads, even in software engineering) - socialization for young adults (I know many people who went to college in large part to make friends, and learning as a reason for going was treated as a smaller reason) - research, etc Colleges will remain here and for the foreseeable future, they are still very useful to many people. Altman is now at Open AI but I'm sure being YC's president for a while, Sam understands that YC has a vested interest in disrupting colleges, through investments like Lambda School (sorry, Bloom Tech).
• mikpanko 5y ago
  One interesting idea is replacing traditional student loans with personal funding based on "personal equity", similar to VC funding of startups. Backers would provide funds for individual's education in exchange for a percentage of their lifetime earnings. Obviously, there is a number of questions to think through here, but the incentives of all participants seem to be much better aligned to produce best results for the society. Lambda School / BloomTech and a few other companies are already looking in this direction but haven't broken into mainstream yet.
• neilv 5y ago
  > Tech jobs (I assume other jobs will follow) are increasingly willing to hire with no degree if an applicant can do well in an interview/on a test. IME, software/computer jobs used to be more a meritocracy. The current hiring shibboleths for class happened later, popularized by early Google.
• Proven 5y ago
  [dead]
• scaramanga 5y ago
  This thread is like a parody of a wealthy tech-bro hot-take on any policy issue. The purpose of the debt forgiveness is precisely to transfer wealth to people who need it. Whether the institutions can be profitable or not without further government funding is practically immaterial. If the institution is doing a social good, it probably cannot be self-funding. In which case, yes, we will bail it out again. And again. And essentially just make higher education something that the state uses it's tax revenue to provide for it's constituents because they've decided that that is what they want. Of course, the rich will pay disproportionately for that. But then, they have benefited disproportionately from living in the society. The institutions that provide "social good" for this small minority are already funding proprieties for the state which panders to their every need and whim. So why shouldn't actually socially beneficial institutions like schools and universities also be funded? Who could possibly be baffled by this? Nobody, except for multi-millionaire tech-bros.
  • anaccountexists 5y ago
    Isn’t the actual problem that we’re sending people to 4 year institutions who… don’t actually need the education they’re getting? I have so many friends that graduated with ridiculous amounts of debt to go into escape room design or being a barista (neither of which had anything to do with their degrees). They were told a lie, like many others, that they should “choose what makes them happy” when studying and now they’re screwed for the foreseeable future finance-wise. Debt forgiveness addresses a symptom, not the core issue. I support it because I’ve seen firsthand how much of a hole it’s left people who made bad choices as a high schooler in, but we can’t keep making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place.
  • ergocoder 5y ago
    > Nobody, except for multi-millionaire tech-bros. Yours is a shittier take. I agree government should fund education. Sam agrees, but it needs to come with a long term solution. Canceling debt now has 2 issues. 1. The current proposal is extremely unfair to poor people who decided not to take a student loan. And I never see anyone address this unfairness. 2. It will skyrocket the tuition cost even more.
• llamataboot 5y ago
  Wonder if the VC crowd also has a problem with European universities (which of course, are mostly free) or if it's just the US ones...
• givemeethekeys 5y ago
  For those who care about things like "social fabric", the unintended consequences of not being able to declare bankruptcy on a student loan are that there's a strong possibility that your future wife, if she's above average looking with a great education was a stripper / escort for a little while to help pay off that loan. This is what happens when we ban people from being able to declare bankruptcy.
  • bestcoder69 5y ago
    Strong possibility? Like what odds are we talking here?
    • givemeethekeys 5y ago
      If you think that decriminalization takes place when a majority of the population is in favor of it, then New York is moving to decriminalize sex work. I'd say that the odds are good.
      • throwawayurlife 5y ago
        Folks, let me prove with LOGIC and REASON that all women are prostitutes. DEBATE ME! 1/207
• gh0std3v 5y ago
  It's late at night so apologies if this seems incoherent. I recently applied to college and I got into a university that is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with where I am and I consider myself fortunate in every regard to be going to college. That being said, I have some reservations about the college admissions process and I think this Twitter thread addresses it well. In particular, I think there is an ongoing trend to eliminate standardized tests in favor of more "subjective" and "holistic" measurements like your essays and extracurriculars. While I think it's perfectly fine to have students write about themselves and their achievements, I think it's still way too integral to the admissions process and there needs to be more balance. Personally, when I wrote my essays, even though I was trying to be authentic and I did write about experiences that were meaningful to me, I always felt as if it wasn't enough. I just kept wondering, "what are they looking for?" And I couldn't really get a good grasp of whether what I was writing was "good" or not. To me, the essays completely obscure the nature of the admissions process because no college can clearly tell you what they want. Hell, even some admissions officers seem to dodge the question when you ask them what they look for in an essay (or they provide really vague answers). I think it's silly to make the essays so critical to the process when they clearly don't allow anyone to extrapolate concrete things about a person's abilities or skills. Many smart people I know were rejected from universities that I think they should have gotten into even though they easily would fit in and thrive in those places. By the end of the college admissions process, even though I was happy with the college I got into, I honestly felt a little jaded. Sure, I'm happy that I got in, but I feel as if I couldn't properly communicate my skills to the admissions officers. It just makes me feel as if your skills matter less than your ability to impress people. Maybe it was naïve of me to think that it would be different in an academic institution compared to the corporate world, but it is a little disheartening in the end. I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but this post resonated with me and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.
• mc4ndr3 5y ago
  A degree in Computer Science + twenty years of experience doesn't mean squat with the current recruiting process. We're incentivizing failure.
• Teknoman117 5y ago
  In reading further down that thread, I had a question about one of the tweets - why would a "zero discrimination" admission environment result in 65% of admitted college students being Asian-American? Assuming a completely unbiased and equal opportunity environment from birth until college (which obviously is not the situation, this just a hypothetical), wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation? The 2020 census results have 6% of respondents identifying as Asian or Asian-American. Obviously wealth disparities such as access to education create over and under representation for groups, but a 10x over-representation being "proper" seems a bit high to throw out there without some citations...
  • ghiculescu 5y ago
    > wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demographics of the state or nation? No, even if you took out all wealth disparities. Different demographics (this is a big generalization but that’s literally the question) value different things. And so those that value college would be overrepresented in college - same would apply in other competitive areas eg sport.
  • zzt123 5y ago
    That 65.8% seems high to me using benchmarks of UC and Stuyvesant, but it is true Asians would be “grossly over represented” at top schools if not for affirmative action. Thus the current push to enforce affirmative action on the UC system. Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform.
    • Teknoman117 5y ago
      > Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform. I guess it depends on how you classify a minority - e.g. population, education, gender, wealth, income, etc. Asian-Americans are certainly one of the smallest demographic groups in the US, and even smaller if you split them further by the ethnicity they most identify with (Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, etc.), but as far as UC's student population goes, they do represent the majority of students by a long shot at 40%. The next largest group is the Latino students at 30% of the population and then "white" students at 20%.
• holdenc 5y ago
  While I agree that 200K in debt for a BA in English is not a wise choice, there's a whole class of families that can afford the 200K out of pocket, and will happily pay it for a top school. I have a child, and will do it for the following reasons: - You only get one chance to be 18 - 22 years old. College is a great way to improve your appreciation of culture, society, and build social skills, prior to taking a full time job. - I know many youngsters here will likely have a problem with this -- but the average 18 year old has some intellectual and emotional maturing to do. This can happen via the social and academic challenges of college. In fact, the best colleges will sell this over any practical skills. Work life can be a grind, even for someone with their dream job. When was the last time you had a chance to try your hand at literary criticism, or game theory, or learning a new language? How did it go the first time you had to ask for help with an intellectual problem? (Probably a distant thought in the minds of the average senior developer). How about the last time you had to cooperate with several people you dislike? College is a good place to get started with these things.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    > When was the last time you had a chance to try your hand at literary criticism, or game theory, or learning a new language? How did it go the first time you had to ask for help with an intellectual problem? Just to be a contrarian (on HN, of all places!), I'm in my late twenties and know a couple of people who are at least a little bit bitter/regretful that they spent their early twenties learning game theory and literary criticism rather than how to function as an adult.
• smugma 5y ago
  My roommate freshman year at Cal was on the football team (and later went to play in the NFL). He took a physics “for poets” class by a great professor (George Smoot) and he’d talk about how awesome it was. A couple of years later I had a different roommate who did some research for the same professor. Smoot later went on to win a Nobel. I had two different roommates with very different abilities both benefit from having this world class professor as part of their lives. Many of my CS and physics professors were “famous” but also great professors. In contrast, I thought most of my math professors were terrible. As they were bad at teaching, I simply assumed they must have been good at research.
• qiskit 5y ago
  I agree with most of his premises but I don't see how his premises lead to his conclusion - US collge education is near to collapse. 1. School loan debts aren't ideal and we should look for ways to eliminate them permanently. It's ridiculous that american students have to start their adult lives with so much debt. However, the fact that so many students are willing to go into debt for college shows that they there is tremendous demand for college education. My alma mater has continuously raised tuition ( far higher than inflation ) and also increased enrollment and yet have no problem finding students. Even if they doubled the tuition, they would have no problem meeting their enrollment goals. The domestic and international demand for US college education is simply too great for it to collapse any time soon. 2. I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me. 3. It's blatantly obvious colleges are discriminating against asian students to a ridiculous degree and white students to some degree as well. It should stop but I don't see how that would collapse US college education? Asian and white students still want and are going to get a college education. 4. Stopping standardized testing is also ridiculous. It shouldn't be the only factor in admissions, but certainly we need some form standardized testing in the mix. Admissions should be given more data to work with, not less. But once again, I fail to see how this would collapse US college education.
  • randomdata 5y ago
    > I've never worked with anyone in tech who didn't have at least some college education. Maybe the college education wasn't in CS, but they all had some college education. So the idea that tech companies are going to hire people without some college education seems suspect to me. I have worked with some, but they were the type who could succeed in college if they had reason to. Whereas a lot of the population simply cannot hack the academic rigor, and these people tend to struggle in the workplace for the same reason. I expect what he is trying to say, which is something we've known for a long time, is that college looks good by the numbers only because it does a good job of filtering out those destined to fail, so to speak. If we take it to the logical extreme, we know someone with, say, down syndrome is unlikely to go to college and unlikely do well in the workplace and we understand that it is their disability that produces that outcome, not because they didn't 'pull up their bootstraps' and work hard. The same idea applies across the continuum of the population. What employers want are the people on the right side of that continuum. The people born to be successful. Coupled with the social pressure for the capable to attend college, meaning that most people on the right side attend, it has served as a really good proxy for employers to evaluate. However, tech has found even more reliable methods for determining where one sits on said continuum, so that's where things are starting to break down. In terms of people, tech is incredibly small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, though. It's not clear if other industries have figured out the same. All that said, at this point, college has become religion. Even if we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is entirely useless, people will still want to spend their life savings on it to satisfy their inner craving for a sense of meaning in the same way that other religions attract that mindset. A collapse is laughable. That is like saying that Christianity will collapse because businesses no longer require you to pledge your allegiance to God.
• WoodenChair 5y ago
  Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for consultation not diagnosis. [1] In 2015 he predicted: “Self-driving cars are going to get here much faster than people think,” Altman said. He thought we’d see them in three to four years. [2] I think he would be wise to learn from Bill Gates that it's a bad idea to over-predict what will happen in the short term. "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." I'll add to this that it's generally a bad idea to make big predictions outside of areas that you have strong domain knowledge in. I doubt Sam Altman has strong domain knowledge around US higher education. Unfortunately, Silicon Valley culture is full of people who feel that because they've succeeded in one domain they have some kind of hidden insight into others. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go-away-but-massive-abundance-likely.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/sam-altman-on-ai-jobs-may-go... [1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-020-07230-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00330-020-07230-9 [2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/elon-musk-sam-altman-say-self-driving-cars-are-going-to-be-on-the-road-in-just-a-few-years/ https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/06/elon-musk-sam-altman-say-s...
  • pm90 5y ago
    He and others like him really need to just get off Twitter. Get someone to build a VC only Twitter clone, put their garbage opinions there and satisfy the need to post.
    • AussieWog93 5y ago
      >Get someone to build a VC only Twitter clone, put their garbage opinions there and satisfy the need to post. Already done (LinkedIn clone, but close enough), by an HN user too: https://www.shlinkedin.com/ https://www.shlinkedin.com/
    • vasco 5y ago
• yalogin 5y ago
  Is there any research into why college fee is going up? I read somewhere that the fee rose 5x compared to inflation over the last 50 yrs. Do colleges amass wealth and stash them for a rainy day? I am not talking about for profit colleges many of which feel more like scams to me. I am trying to think what could have added to costs. The cost of research probably increased as the low hanging fruit are done and research in general is more involved now. May be the salaries grew in-line with the rest of the country. Did the overall government funding fall over the decades? Overall, I agree with Sam here, any peripheral gestures without addressing the root cause is pointless. But the current US political system has no aptitude to solve problems. In fact they have realized they want to ensure the other party fails so they can point and they in elections. Politics has become a perverse selfish game rather than about governance and people. The best they can do is enable companies to offer more loans and more ways to repay and that’s it.
• rdevsrex 5y ago
  I'm for free college at public universities, but I think that if the government wasn't backing student loans at all, there would be an incentive for more affordable private colleges. I mean, look at coding bootcamps and all of these online learning platforms, the market found a niche. I think the same would happen with colleges without the gravy train of student loans. Have a 3 tiered system of free public, cheap private, and expensive private would serve everyone I think.
• samisupset 5y ago
  It seems like this tweetstorm is rooted in Sam getting asked to acknowledge that his privilege made his life possible?
• ryanyde 5y ago
  Unfortunately Sam wholly misses the point of college: it's a social club / network. The issue is "for-profit" colleges and the common misconception that college is about skills / education, when it's really (again) an expensive country club. Sadly, the further in your career you go, the more it becomes pertinent who you know, and how many people in your network succeeded and can pull strings for you. It's not everything, but it's these breaks that often separate the smash successes and the grinders-for-life. Getting drunk and party and studying for 4 years is a durable way to build bonds. Hopefully most schools begin to focus on trades, and the Harvard / Princetons of the world just openly accept they're not for learning.
• sidcool 5y ago
  I think the issue is not with colleges themselves. It's with American colleges specifically. Mainly the obsessive for profit nature of it.
• woopwoop 5y ago
  This thread conflates "boo higher education" with "higher education is on the verge of collapse". If institutions of higher education are discriminating massively against Asians (and it's pretty clear that they are) won't the supreme court ending this practice improve them? This is a reason to be sanguine about college's prospects, not the opposite.
• gzer0 5y ago
  Much of this originates from a fundamental aversion to higher education, information, and the capacity to think critically. If you haven't noticed, there has been a concerted effort to purposely limit and/or obstruct people's capacity to think critically. It appears as though a certain party has determined that it is preferable if their constituents remain illiterate and are doing everything in their power to push laws and regulations that do just that. In Arizona, Florida, and Indiana, students have to seek permission from parents before being taught about “human sexuality”. Local pressures against “critical race theory” have led to educators self-censoring, districts abandoning equity initiatives. In at least 10 states, legislators have proposed bills that would require administrators to list every book, reading, and activity that teachers use in their lessons, a process that educators argue would be cumbersome and expensive. A lot of people are concerned with a growing concentration of wealth in the top 1%; however, I think an even more concerning problem will be the growing inequality we see with those that are learned, and those that are not. It is clear what one side wants. And it is not a good outcome for any of us.
• Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  I went to a college, that shall not be named and was fast from Ivy league, but still has this annoying mindset that the education they provided was for the greater good, and not for lowering yourself to such common activities like finding work.
• throwawayacc2 5y ago
  Quote from the thread > (A personal anecdote: I was invited a few years ago to speak at a college but I was asked to give a 'privilege disclaimer', essentially stating that if I didn't look like I did I wouldn't have been able to succeed... I don’t know how other people feel about this but personally when I see things like this I get extremely annoyed. What the disclaimer is actually saying is “white people can’t succeed on their own”. Don’t try to twist it because this is what it’s being implied. The implication of the disclaimer is “If you are white, you cannot succeed on your own, the only reason for your success is dumb luck”. How is this different from saying “blacks can’t succeed on their own, if you see a successful one, that’s just dumb luck”. Please, tell me. The whole discussion on “privilege” is ridiculous, racist, offensive and is nothing but a grift from losers too dumb and lazy for STEM who went to gender studies instead to make money.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  Tuition and living costs have artificially doubled since 2010 across the board, if not tripled. If you went to school more than 5 years ago it is entirely different. Classes are held online, even on campus. Almost everything is done digitally and online. Student suicide, depression are sky rocketing. COVID rules have completely changed how campus living works - students would rather be on TikTok than be forced to wear masks or get forcibly "quarantined" (legal jail cell). Yes, that is real, it goes on every day. Students are not allowed to protest universities, the law in all states is written in such a way that you have no tenant rights, no representation, and the University can do as they please. They reap the benefits of a private org (predatory contracts) while socializing the cost (grants/loans) That money from housing and tuition is absorbed into a black hole, it is not used for student programs. It is not used to improve education. We cannot get basic equipment. We cannot provide a proper education. Universities have been overrun by blue types that are now forcing even more unnecessary and politically motivated classes, promoting activism and specific kinds of beliefs as if they are academic. They're cherry picking academic knowledge for what aligns to their politics. The core competencies are underfunded, students don't receive the help they need, and are overshadowed by the admins shiny new false humanities programs. Students this summer will go homeless because they cannot pay for summer housing. Uni housing charges exorbant artificial pricing well above market. Again, private profits, social costs. Students cannot afford an education, and even those that do don't get a quality education outside of a few top universities. This is unsustainable, but various beliefs prevent us from doing the right thing - defunding. We need a mass firing and reorganization of American education.
  • bob1029 5y ago
    Everyone in education I have spoken with says we should just nuke it from orbit at this point. Like, physically torch all the school buildings and go back to the drawing board on how to teach people shit in 2022 and beyond.
• karmasimida 5y ago
  Deny student loans to major that has low ROI? This could solve a lot of problem.
• jkepler 5y ago
  Neither his tweet thread nor the primary level comments mentioned the real reason for collapsing in higher education: broadly speaking, as a culture, we've lost any confidence that truth exists and should form us as persons, that knowledge is fundamentally unified across academic disciplines, and that the purpose of university is to educate people in true knowledge. Universities were largely started by people with convictions that there is universal knowledge or truth, and that the pursuit of that truth shapes people in ways that are highly beneficial to society. This is where the idea or peer review originated---no person can grasp the truth fully or comprehensively, thus to advance human knowledge peer review was necessary (Peer review, like higher education, is deeply broken). Today western culture has lost confidence that truth exists or can be found. One can see this by looking at some of the oldest universities' mottos, particularly by paying attention to how the mottos have changed and/or the informal mottos in use. Harvard Motto [1636]: Veritas ("Truth"), but historically it was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae ("Truth for Christ and Church").[1] William & Mary [1693] (Who knows the original and current mottos - I didn't find them with a quick search), but the charter calls for founding "a certain place of universal study" for training Christian pastors and to educate youth.[2] Yale University motto [1701]: Lux et veritas (Latin) אורים ותומים (Hebrew) Motto in English: Light and truth[3] Princeton Motto [1746]: Dei Sub Numine Viget On seal: Vet[us] Nov[um] Testamentum Motto in English: Under God's Power She Flourishes On seal: Old Testament and New Testament Informal motto. In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity[4] So, I would say that university education has already collapsed, in the sense that its devolved from a mission of education in formative truth for life to its current amalgamation of gaining job/career skills, academic research, sports, elite networking, or party-years paid for by debt or parents. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_University https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Harvard_Universit... [2] William & Mary's charter begins, "Forasmuch as our well-beloved and faithful subjects, constituting the General Assembly of our Colony of Virginia, have had it in their minds, and have proposed to themselves, to the end that the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of Almighty God; to make, found and establish a certain place of universal study, or perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences..." https://web.archive.org/web/20080919125611/http://www.swem.wm.edu/departments/special-collections/exhibits/exhibits/charter/charter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080919125611/http://www.swem.w... [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University [4] https://profile.princeton.edu/princeton-milestones https://profile.princeton.edu/princeton-milestones
• deleted 5y ago
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• mbgerring 5y ago
  This is a great example of a persistent problem in contemporary American public discourse — when a wealthy person goes on Twitter and makes an off-hand comment about some stuff he heard from friends or on a podcast or whatever (he doesn’t say, so you’re left to just guess), people receive it as wisdom, instead of the bullshit[1] that it is. 1. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...
• sonnyblarney 5y ago
• grapeskin 5y ago
  10 years ago when I was in college, I remember reading HN and being fairly convinced by the "college is on the verge of collapse. Get out while you can" stuff. Thankfully I didn't buy into the idea completely. Because, let's be honest, if you're not a person who can enter Stanford on a red carpet thanks to being born in an upper class family, you're probably better off making your own connections in college.
• kodah 5y ago
  The part of a CS degree you can't skip is the math. If there were courses just for taking this math and learning how to apply it in languages I think you'd see engineering numbers soar. Also worth noting the obvious, this math isn't required in the industry but is used heavily in interviewing. Source: am a dropout. Learning math was the hard part; coding and infra are the fun part.
• bojangleslover 5y ago
  My friend got caught drunk driving in college. The local police turned him over to the campus police and then his parents donated money to the school. I think this tells you a lot about the "continued adolescence" theory.
• 8bitsrule 5y ago
  Suppose there was a video series that lets you (or any high-school graduate) explore inside the 1001 possible things you might do. Each topic starting with short (5-10 min) overviews, and the investment you'd need to make. Then, for each one, an hour-long exploration with someone who's enjoyed doing what they do for 20 years. Then a long list of ways to explore further. Librarian? Scientist? Firefighter? Cowboy? Shoes? Radiologist? College might be the way ... or the worst possible choice. Depends on you. Makes no sense to invest a lot of time and $$$ without exposure to all of your options. Or to stick with something you don't like, when there are 1000 other things. Right now ... where do you turn to find out about them? It's crickets out there.
• jkingsbery 5y ago
  At some point, four years of college is going to be more expensive than buying a house. At which point, the rational thing (for most) will be to skip college and just buy a house.
• lbriner 5y ago
  One thing mentioned about standardised tests and correlation with socio-economic status is a largely unsolvable problem imho. Ultimately, money can buy you most things. However you test someone, their family wealth is more likely to result in better access to standard and additional education, possibly more exposure to other clever children/adults to encourage and teach you and a home life that is sometimes? more conducive to learning compared to the people at the bottom of the ladder. You can't buy top-level intelligence but you can mostly buy your way into any insitution. Therefore, I think it is a straw man (as the OP says) to remove something that exists in life. Sure, there are things like IQ tests which are supposed to be about objective intelligence but they are both too abstract to draw out whether an individual will actually do well in e.g. comp-sci or physics and can also be trained on.
• praestigiare 5y ago
  This is one decent and uncontroversial point: that the system of student loans is not working well, followed by a lot of very bad arguments. Take this, for example; “Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning.” It starts with negative priming. Though he has not and will not do any work to actually suggest colleges are monocultures, he throws it out there. Then he invites you to think of negative stories, and suggests some of them are probably true. In a complete non-sequitur (it must be, because he has not actually defined a premise, just asked his audience to imagine one), he provides a conclusion. But even there, to deflect criticism he moves the goalposts, implying that to be successful, colleges should be “hyperfocused.”
  • Jtype 5y ago
    Mono-cultures do suck. They lead to groupthink, where nuance, alternative viewpoints/actions, and growth are shunned. Groupthink leads to stagnation, which has been shown time and time again. groupthink is what convinced Putin that he could easily waltz into Ukraine, and "liberate" them from the "Nazis" running the country. There was no dissenting viewpoint allowed by Putin, only groupthink.
• jliptzin 5y ago
  College isn’t going anywhere. Where I grew up, rich parents sent their kids to college (in many cases their own alma mater) to get them out of the house, have them find a future spouse, continue playing a sport but at a college level, join a fraternity and/or make new connections. Learning skills for a job or doing research were dead last on the list of priorities for either parent or student. And that’s who it was for in the first place hundreds of years ago - rich kids.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Anyone explain what patio’s tweet means? What’s pmc? > I think specifically it is vulnerable to a preference cascade in the PMC, similar to the way that organized religion has also suffered from a preference cascade, and accordingly think a) less likely to be any one catalyst or reason its less relevant and b) can happen quickly. https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/1505605060834709510 https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/150560506083470951...
  • timdellinger 5y ago
    if you read the thread: PMC = professional managerial class
• julesqs 5y ago
  more than ten tweets from Sam in this thread and he doesn't mention that public colleges used to be essentially free, but now cost enough to put students into crippling debt. And the last tweet seems to suggest he thinks the remedy is a for profit alternative. The libertarian privatization gene is strong at YC
• ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I listened to a Cory Doctorow podcast about a Terry Pratchett book and was pleased that when asked about how he got into computers he basically said "being born in 1971 with a computer scientist dad really helps". Who does that send a bad message to and what is that bad message? I can clearly see the good message, but what's the bad one Sam was so keen to avoid?
• Damogran6 5y ago
  At a couple times in my kid’s development, I noticed: 1. My Alma mater went from an, I’m sure, perfectly adequate Stadium 8 blocks off-campus to a Many-tens-of-millions-of-dollars on-campus stadium. I’m sure to ‘attract more meat for the meatgrinder and compete with the other colleges’ 2. The fresh doe-eyed representatives at College night at school rattled off numbers that amounted to $250-$300k per student, but that there were ‘ways to defer a little of that…maybe’ 3. I have twins. I had 30 years to pay off my mortgage, which was half the outlay of two college educations. And I could live there. And it appreciates in value while I do so. I felt like it wasn’t my responsibility to prop up the bad financial decisions of complete strangers, nor encumber the family to more than half a million dollars in debt for 4 years so that they could see a fancy stadium on-campus. And yet there’s still that nagging voice in my head that’s asking me if I’m gambling my kid’s future on a state college and a trade-school at 1/4th the cost.
• mathattack 5y ago
  There is a lot of talk about decoupling universities, and their coming collapse. Let me take the contrary opinion, and defend why they will stay. (This is not a defense of their efficacy, only their economics) Private non-profit universities are essentially run by their tenures faculty. At prestigious universities the focus is primarily research. Everything they do should be in the eyes of this stakeholder group. The “undergraduate experience” exists as a profit center to fund the tenured faculty. Sports teams and fancy dorms (and binge drinking) are more important (and easier to quantify) to the buyers of education than educational quality so that’s where the investment goes. Buyers will choose “facilities and brand” over education enough to keep the schools looking elite. As long as admissions grades and test scores are high enough, the rest doesn’t matter. (The kids will succeed in life anyway) At “for profit” universities just replace the tenured faculty with shareholders. Same model just no pretense of research. For 2nd and 3rd tier universities it’s similar but with much less money to go around. (Less endowment and tuition) Layer onto this that the government is guaranteeing the bill and you have no incentive for the folks in charge to change their behavior. As a society we can say we are tired of being on the hook, but until that happens there is a lot of inertia to overcome. That’s why we didn’t see a mass collapse of universities in any of the last 4 recessions.
  • efficax 5y ago
    > Private non-profit universities are essentially run by their tenures faculty Nonsense. They're run by their boards and by professional administrators. The faculty have been steadily losing real influence since the MBAs started getting involved in universities in the 1980s. (Universities at the big level are basically holding companies managing assets called an Endowment that just happen to hold classes)
  • i_am_proteus 5y ago
    Whether undergraduates (really their parents and the government supplying their loans and grants) attend and pay for a school is based on the "brand" and more than the education, so the institution cares more about the brand than the education. Research, however, directly brings in money through grants, and "better" research faculty publish more and bring in more grant money. The incentives are very straightforward and the universities are responding to them. If NIH, DOD, etc., had a metric on grant applications asking what percentage of department faculty were in full-time professional teaching positions (not adjuncts, educators with no research expectation, often called "Professor of Practice") targeting ≥20%, this ship would right itself in a couple of years.
• jokoon 5y ago
  I am not american, but how do so many people decide to get a student loan? Is that the same scenario of 2008? Are there loan sharks for student loan? Do universities encourage student to get a loan? Are there a lot of people who are going to default? It sounds like a new 2008 all over again.
• holbrad 5y ago
  While I don't agree with him entirely. Brian Caplan has some interesting thoughts on the topic of education. Around the idea that most of the value is around signalling to others (Via credentials), rather than what you learn.* Certainly from talking to other people about their recent university education (UK), most people seem to agree that they leant & retained very little. I can't help but wonder if for a lot of people an apprenticeship scheme would be better overall. *Summarising a whole book in a sentence is rather difficult, and I surely didn't do it justice.
• TimPC 5y ago
  I wonder if liability for brain damage due to certain popular sports will end up being a factor. The fund the NFL set aside was rather expensive and it’s quite clear colleges will soon be required to do the same. Football has long been regarded as free money but giving people brain damage has very real costs.
• NoGravitas 5y ago
  For US college education to collapse, a bunch of other things are going to have to collapse, too. The crisis in US college education is a crisis of elite overproduction, along with a concurrent increase in economic inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. A college education is a requirement to enter or stay in the professional-managerial class (PMC), and avoid the increasing immiseration of the working class in the US. That's why people are willing to spend so much money on it. The problem is that the PMC is shrinking as their jobs are gradually eliminated and replaced with proletarianized ones: doctors with nurse practitioners and PAs, tenured professors with adjuncts. So the higher education system is overproducing PMC candidates who will either never work in their field, or will work in its non-PMC roles, and struggle to pay off the debt on a gamble that didn't work out. This, of course, makes PMC parents desperate to get their children into elite colleges, to make them competitive for the declining slots. This is, of course, over time, a losing strategy, but it's one that is short-sightedly rational. I don't think we're actually going to see a decline in credentialism, as @sama suggests is going on. I expect it to intensify, if anything. For the education pyramid scheme to collapse, there will have to be a fundamental reorientation of the economy and power structures in the US, which is to say, a collapse thereof.
• newbamboo 5y ago
  Professors teach our elite how to think. Some former students escape their cognitive strictures, so perhaps sama is not too heavily influenced by his schooling. But most elites are, obviously the product of their educational experiences. And these well trained elites run the government and control the media. The media trains the unwashed masses how to think through culture creation and the like. I won’t bet against the universities, though I agree strongly with the case against them.
• helen___keller 5y ago
  I’m not sure how a “collapse” is supposed to happen. The reason everything remains awful is because everyone is already acting in their best interest. The employers want the elite students, the elite students want degrees from elite universities, and all the other students want to look as close to “elite” as possible (by attending the most elite institution available to them) Unless you tell motivated and well-connected teenagers they’re not allowed to attend Harvard or Yale, the prestige signal of Harvard and Yale will continue to live on, as yet another class of motivated and well connected 22 year olds graduate. Short of government action (like make it illegal to discriminate in hiring based on which institution you graduated from?) I don’t see how that prestige signal (or the structure of incentives associated) goes away
• etempleton 5y ago
  While higher education in the United States is certainly in crisis, I do not agree with the premise that it is anywhere near collapse. Higher education is under increased financial pressure in the United States due to population decline; falling per pupil federal funding; and stagnated wages for the middle class. In response colleges are increasing their endowment to secure their financial future and so that they may offer a larger average discount rate. Google any college or look at college niche and you will see an average net price paid significantly lower than the listed tuition price. This is a new development from a decade ago where most students paid full sticker price to go to college. Now, I do agree that higher education is trying to do too much these days, but for that to change expectations would need to change. College shopping is like car shopping. People say they want a simple practical car with good gas mileage at an affordable price, but then when it comes time to buy they are willing to pay a bit more for the nicer stereo, leather seats, CarPlay, etc, etc. Nowhere is this seen more than in the precipitous decline in community college enrollment compared to four year colleges.
• panny 5y ago
  That's not a tweet, it's a blog post. I will never understand why people do this. Twitter tries to force me to sign up if I scroll down too far. Sorry Sam, I guess I won't be reading your wisdom today.
• yumraj 5y ago
  > What a time to start an alternative to college! The world really needs it. Not that I disagree with many things that were said, but I'm wondering is this the prelude to him, or a YC startup, announcing an alternative to college?
• de_nied 5y ago
  I am reminded more and more of 2008. An academic loan bubble. Students paying tens of thousands for network connections and a degree. Student's parents putting loans in their names for it. We started with Coronavirus, went into "The Great Resignation", and ended up at Ukraine. Fast-forward to student loan payments restarting, how many people will be able to afford it after all that? Assume they can afford it, how many would rather default? A bubble, just waiting, patiently.