5 ms·

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3.

by xbar 4y ago

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the education will significantly exceed the average of any of these institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_for-profit_universities_and_colleges https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_for-profit_universitie...

alimov 4y ago
an interesting idea…
harmon 4y ago
I agree and have had a similar idea for awhile. Have the best lecturers for given subjects create outstanding virtual courses, develop sets of curricula off of those courses, and have TAs (PhDs in your model) provide local instruction and tutoring to augment the standard coursework. It seems crazy to me that we have thousands of new faculty members and PhDs begrudgingly spending time developing their own way of teaching material (instead of working on research which is what they actually want to do and are good at) when there are people who are clearly the best in the business at teaching their subject matter whose work we should be using instead.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Based on my experience, we'd get better real world results if we abandoned most universities and promoted community colleges to full undergrad level. My best teachers by far were at a community college. Probably because that's all they did. No begrudgingly 'teaching' students while really wanting to do research. Not that there isn't a place for research teaching, and students along that path, but like 99% of everyone else would get better results from a different academic culture.
maybelsyrup 4y ago
I can't tell if this is real or a parody of the SV ed-tech solution-ism of the last decade
- st34m 4y ago
  Yeah, what could be so hard about buying a 50 billion dollar "big computer" and hiring 10,000 PhDs for an online platform that doesn't exist yet? Ha! It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.
- drc500free 4y ago
  Either way, the upvotes were unironic.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
quadrifoliate 4y ago
From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million. Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research. By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist? ---------------------------------------- [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-projections-high-school-graduates-mean-colleges-and-universities https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-p...
- a2tech 4y ago
  - BarryMilo 4y ago
    To be fair, replacing an expensive diploma mill with a free/public diploma mill isn't that bad an idea. Probably just too "socalist" for North America. Imagine if everyone could have access to higher education without going into massive debt!
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    Uninformed tech people are better than a lot of experts in many fields. Wouldn't be the first time. Bezos responded to COVID faster than the NIAID.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.
temp8964 4y ago
I guess you can use the same idea to create a national car company, a national cloud service company, a national food company, a national computer store, a national hospital, a national everything company. What a great idea!
_jal 4y ago
> you have created a national public college for pennies. You've slightly modernized correspondence school. Just to start with what's missing, the vast majority of students need some degree of individualized attention to learn effectively.
egypturnash 4y ago
This solution is missing the chance at connections made by attending a school teeming with the useless scions of the rich, who will be handed plum jobs upon graduations. You're not going to have a chance to hook up with something like Skull & Bones sitting there doing remote learning the way you will by coughing up the fees to attend one of the Ivy League schools.
- 40acres 4y ago
  I think this is overrated. I went to a rinky dink community college. It was a very urban school (meaning, no grassy hillside campus, we were in the middle of NYC and students had jobs and families to go) and did not have a campus life, so I didn't make many connections with my other students. I still ended up with a great degree in CS and a great job. For sure if I went to a campus I'd have more opportunities to network and maybe be further in my career, but I achieved success without that.
escape_goat 4y ago
Aspects of this idea will probably not work out, most especially the math, from the first few answers. The baby that HN has in the bathwater is the infrastructure aspect. The arguments for physically centralized educational institutions as a necessity rather than a luxury good are very weak outside of programs with practical physical components, which I would imagine to be a big chunk of STEM and the fine arts. That sort of physical infrastructure — labs, studios, theaters — is itself much more distributable and interchangeable at the undergraduate level than in the current system. The technology to hold lectures and seminars remotely is fully mature, and even if physical needs remain, those needs can be met by local infrastructure. Pedagogically, development of wider course standards and more sophisticated modes of course credit assignment are both feasible information-architecture level projects, and all these things taken together could transform education from a credential gateway implicitly knitting social networks designed to retain power to a ubiquitous more cloud-like environment focused purely on the learning, scholarship, and research that is needed to actually keep the wheels from falling off society. A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.
doctor_eval 4y ago
Since this is HN I just want to point out that $50 Billion will buy you 50 new exaflop systems [0]. That’s a lot of awfully big computers to use as web servers. You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) Update: frontier [1] is faster and cheaper but my point stands. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)

by xbar 4y ago

alimov 4y ago

an interesting idea…

harmon 4y ago

I agree and have had a similar idea for awhile. Have the best lecturers for given subjects create outstanding virtual courses, develop sets of curricula off of those courses, and have TAs (PhDs in your model) provide local instruction and tutoring to augment the standard coursework. It seems crazy to me that we have thousands of new faculty members and PhDs begrudgingly spending time developing their own way of teaching material (instead of working on research which is what they actually want to do and are good at) when there are people who are clearly the best in the business at teaching their subject matter whose work we should be using instead.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Based on my experience, we'd get better real world results if we abandoned most universities and promoted community colleges to full undergrad level. My best teachers by far were at a community college. Probably because that's all they did. No begrudgingly 'teaching' students while really wanting to do research. Not that there isn't a place for research teaching, and students along that path, but like 99% of everyone else would get better results from a different academic culture.

maybelsyrup 4y ago

I can't tell if this is real or a parody of the SV ed-tech solution-ism of the last decade

st34m 4y ago
Yeah, what could be so hard about buying a 50 billion dollar "big computer" and hiring 10,000 PhDs for an online platform that doesn't exist yet? Ha! It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.
drc500free 4y ago
Either way, the upvotes were unironic.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

quadrifoliate 4y ago

From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million. Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced career prospects in academia, since they are not doing any research. By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. Feel free to point out a flaw here, but I don't think this plan will work. Basically, you'll end up doing a MOOC site, but those...already exist? ---------------------------------------- [1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-projections-high-school-graduates-mean-colleges-and-universities https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/12/15/what-do-new-p...

a2tech 4y ago
- BarryMilo 4y ago
  To be fair, replacing an expensive diploma mill with a free/public diploma mill isn't that bad an idea. Probably just too "socalist" for North America. Imagine if everyone could have access to higher education without going into massive debt!
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Uninformed tech people are better than a lot of experts in many fields. Wouldn't be the first time. Bezos responded to COVID faster than the NIAID.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1.

temp8964 4y ago

I guess you can use the same idea to create a national car company, a national cloud service company, a national food company, a national computer store, a national hospital, a national everything company. What a great idea!

_jal 4y ago

> you have created a national public college for pennies. You've slightly modernized correspondence school. Just to start with what's missing, the vast majority of students need some degree of individualized attention to learn effectively.

egypturnash 4y ago

This solution is missing the chance at connections made by attending a school teeming with the useless scions of the rich, who will be handed plum jobs upon graduations. You're not going to have a chance to hook up with something like Skull & Bones sitting there doing remote learning the way you will by coughing up the fees to attend one of the Ivy League schools.

40acres 4y ago
I think this is overrated. I went to a rinky dink community college. It was a very urban school (meaning, no grassy hillside campus, we were in the middle of NYC and students had jobs and families to go) and did not have a campus life, so I didn't make many connections with my other students. I still ended up with a great degree in CS and a great job. For sure if I went to a campus I'd have more opportunities to network and maybe be further in my career, but I achieved success without that.

escape_goat 4y ago

Aspects of this idea will probably not work out, most especially the math, from the first few answers. The baby that HN has in the bathwater is the infrastructure aspect. The arguments for physically centralized educational institutions as a necessity rather than a luxury good are very weak outside of programs with practical physical components, which I would imagine to be a big chunk of STEM and the fine arts. That sort of physical infrastructure — labs, studios, theaters — is itself much more distributable and interchangeable at the undergraduate level than in the current system. The technology to hold lectures and seminars remotely is fully mature, and even if physical needs remain, those needs can be met by local infrastructure. Pedagogically, development of wider course standards and more sophisticated modes of course credit assignment are both feasible information-architecture level projects, and all these things taken together could transform education from a credential gateway implicitly knitting social networks designed to retain power to a ubiquitous more cloud-like environment focused purely on the learning, scholarship, and research that is needed to actually keep the wheels from falling off society. A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.

doctor_eval 4y ago

Since this is HN I just want to point out that $50 Billion will buy you 50 new exaflop systems [0]. That’s a lot of awfully big computers to use as web servers. You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer) Update: frontier [1] is faster and cheaper but my point stands. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)