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I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired

I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first. It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor's degree, there's a minimum amount of knowledge you probably have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem). There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without "climbing the ranks" so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).

maegul 4y ago
Absolutely agree. And because of this, any fantasies from tech of easily disrupting education look rather naive … almost like they’re still in the mindset of the student trying to prove their intelligence. It seems then that the technical challenge is certification/assessment. Here, AI could play a role. If a machine can interactively and dynamically have a “conversation” with a person, that is randomised/unique and responsive to the student, all to assess how much they understand a topic, that’d probably do it. Combine it with a certain degree of oversight and random checking and provisions for review/appeal from “actual experts”, and you’d still have something that should scale pretty well beyond the university monopoly. An additional factor is the importance of cultural/mainstream perception. There’s a lot of “hacking” or gaming of the university assessment system, especially if you contrast the reality with the lofty and important goals of education and edification. I’d be interested to know how many, having gone through the system, really put that much faith in the quality of the “certificate”. I’ve certainly heard stories of some people/institutions wishing to also look at high school or secondary college results because they’re less likely to be “gamed” (though I have no idea how common at all this is).
- analog31 4y ago
  Assessment is a minor technical challenge, but finding people to assess might be a bigger challenge. Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. Everything is speculation unless that number can be nailed down. A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of the jobs that are being hired for. An example is the automation of engineering calculations by high level software such as CAD. I've gone through the system. I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
  - maegul 4y ago
    > Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. I'm not sure solitary self-learning is the only type of learning consistent with a disrupting higher education. If technology is to drive change here, I'd argue that a plurality of competing education/learning resources or services from which an individual can cater their choices to their own needs is what would be aimed for (or at least likely). > I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for. I agree. However, to my point about cultural perception, which I believe plays a large role in the state of higher education, what happens when higher education if universally seen as mostly "weeding"? Are the costs, inconveniences, cultural hegemonies/hangups/snobberies desirable and worth it?
    - analog31 4y ago
      The "weeder" course isn't intended to be symbolic. It tends to be a course that can only be offered after the students have gotten through the basic math cycle, i.e., 3rd year, and is heavily mathematical / theory oriented. I taught it once as an adjunct -- Electrodynamics in the EE department. Teachers are fully aware that a "weeder" course is a problem, and make a sincere effort to get as many students through as possible. But nonetheless it results in a lot of attrition.
ramesh31 4y ago
> No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem). State schools have a really unique potential here. There are many now that will confer an on-campus bachelors diploma for 100% remote degrees. The coursework is equally rigorous, administered by a single professor with small class sizes, and the exams are proctored. Any attempt at cheating can be easily snuffed out in this environment. MOOCs are a dead end in terms of providing this. But a state school is a respectable degree and I really hope they’ll extend this to STEM subjects soon.
thwayunion 4y ago
> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order: 1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields. 2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type. 3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.) Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well. Most institutions provide very little signalling value. Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment. And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system. American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs". edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  > Most institutions provide very little signalling value. Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.
nradov 4y ago
Doesn't that depend on the field of study? There is a fairly straightforward path for a motivated student to self-study to the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. But how would that work in, let's say, history? I took a fair number of history courses as electives and if I had just read books and watched videos I think I would have come away with a really skewed and incomplete education. Class discussions with instructors and peers gave me a much better perspective on many topics.
armchairhacker 4y ago
It may be useful to expand proctoring centers, and provide online universities where many exams are taken in-person and a lot of the grade is determined by assignments that can't easily be faked/cheated (e.g. randomly-generated questions, projects) Universities have pre-existing weight and "old money" recognition, but there's nothing inherently more "reliable" about them than online. A lot of people cheat in college, a lot of people take courses with inflated grades or courses which teach old concepts, and then have to learn everything again when they get their first job. It's absolutely true that if someone has a degree from a reputable college they very likely know their field, but if someone has an degree from a "reputable" online college then they also very likely know their field. It's not fair that in order to prove "acquired knowledge" you need to pay over $10K per semester and travel to an expensive college. It would be nice if we start to see people from online universities succeed in the workforce and build great things, then online degrees would likely be accepted more.
- rdtwo 4y ago
  Random does not prevent cheating. Cheating happens because students know the problem style ahead of time. It’s like doing leet code, vs knowing the question and then redoing it with a slightly different question
  - dron57 4y ago
    Being prepared for the problem style ahead of time isn't cheating, it's just studying. If your claim is that this style of studying isn't preparing students for the real world where the problems cannot be easily predicted then I definitely agree. But cramming isn't cheating, students are just trying to succeed within the system.
syzarian 4y ago
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/08/13/how-does-virtual-learning-impact-students-in-higher-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem. I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    > I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough. Is that how you meant it? I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
    - 4y ago
m463 4y ago
What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person. is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
- Hermitian909 4y ago
  > What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? The best predictor of being able to apply knowledge is better mastery of that knowledge and the context in which you are applying it, e.g. to be a creative mathematician you must know some things relating to the problems you're solving deeply. > is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful Most companies use the following signals 1. A track record of success 2. Intelligence 3. Consentiousness - the willingness to do required work even if you don't want to 4. Stress tolerance This is somewhat unsatisfying. One would hope you'd also try to detect attitudes or ideologies that blind you to entire solution spaces or being a massive jerk and alienating people around you.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? You survived the 3-5 year ordeal and got your BSc or MSc, this implies you can apply some knowledge in some way. > in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person. The signal universities provide is not perfect, or even very strongly correlated with anyone's ability to excel in a specific domain. But it is somewhat positively correlated, which means using it as employment filter will weed out more bad than good candidates, which makes hiring cheaper and less risky. In other words: however bad the correlation is, it's already good enough to be useful. > is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? I worry this is an anti-inductive problem: i.e. if you can measure the right factors and predict if a person will be successful accurately enough, you can make people successful (look at it as closed-loop control problem) - but it's most likely cheaper to just make them seem successful instead. The measure becomes a target, and so eventually will cease to become a good measure. (In a sense, BSc and MSc titles are suffering from just that. They're no longer anywhere as strong a signal than they were 50 years ago.) > And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education. Unfortunately, the two goals - teaching for economic prospects, and educating for a rich and successful life in a more general sense - are at odds with each other.
julianeon 4y ago
> It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this. Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test. So this is your class population; now weed them out. Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test. Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them. You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try. Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Look at this from the perspective of the participants of your test: you're asking them to play in a lottery, whose odds are one to million, and the price of admission is years of long, hard work. No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk. But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.
- MagnumOpus 4y ago
  > I'm surprise it hasn't been tried. It has? You are describing every centralised college admissions exam, from the Chinese NCEE ("gaokao") to the Indian JEE-A or the French concours for admission to the better universities...
Spooky23 4y ago
Come on man, you’ve summoned the Stanford people who, like vegans, need to tell us why us peasants just don’t understand.
germinalphrase 4y ago
This base signaling of “minimal viable education” should really lead toward an assessment creation tool that would capture (and then reduce the necessity of) - the massive redundant labor of assessment content creation by educators. A significant portion of the content taught has been assessed a million different times. Much of that assessment content is locked up on static documents making reuse laborious. So - solve the educator’s pain point by allowing me to create an appropriately tailored set of assessment items instantly, curate items rapidly, and proctor the assessment immediately. US states spend something like 1-2 billion/yr on standardized testing. If(!) the veracity of the assessments can be established, move onto chopping the legs of the college board in an innovator’s dilemma situation by providing a lower cost ‘minimal viable education’ credential. Try to reduce the cost and necessity of low value higher education by reducing the perceived value of their credentialing abilities.
hammock 4y ago
>It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks That is not the point of a liberal higher education, though. Historically (for much longer than a century) people were tutored k-12 in their own homes, with their families and neighbors, and not in these government-run public schools. You could learn whatever you wanted from books at home, and a governess and key instructors. Still, you were sent off to college at a certain age, to be finished as either a man or a woman at a place like Harvard or a women’s college. The purpose was not principally to teach you math or anthropology that you couldn’t otherwise learn yourself (though you would learn some math and anthropology). There was another purpose
- MandieD 4y ago
  "... and a governess and key instructors." If your family was wealthy enough for you to be economically inactive as a youth, and to pay for said governess and instructors. Higher education was for the rich, too. As you said, a different purpose, mostly social (definitely social for the wealthy young women). All those little, often church-supported, colleges and land-grant state universities and teachers' colleges that sprang up all over the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That was a revolution: higher education for the non-rich, and mostly for practical purposes.
soferio 4y ago
As for signalling, “The Case Against Education” by Bryan Caplan is a crisply argued case that signalling is >50% at least of what is going on.
- rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago
  My coworkers were talking about this at lunch the other day. An experienced tech guy asked all the employees there what they thought about whether a 4-year degree should be a requirement for tech jobs. All the new grads of course shit on their educations. A couple more senior people were of course more hesitant. But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0. I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was (1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way, (2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and (3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech. I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.
- baandang 4y ago
  I would say 90%. I would contend the main problem is we really don't believe in education as a society. Most people don't even believe that becoming more educated makes you "smarter". "Smart" is this CPU clock speed you naturally have and then "education" is running the cpu through various benchmarks. School is just standardization of the benchmarks so it can't be cheap and freely available. We don't want everyone to join the guild. As a society we want joining the guild to be as prohibitively expensive as possible while pretending we wish the guild could be open and free. All a racket and bullshit for 99% of the population.
randomdata 4y ago
> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. Importantly, though, the topic here is higher education, not education. Higher education refers to a type of business. And the business of higher education isn't in the business of education at all, but rather in the business of socialization. The value proposition is exposure to other, generally like-minded, people in which to engage with and form bonds with, particularly with respect to mating. While at some level something like this very forum could disrupt that there is something missing. Tech hasn't solved for the "human touch" and until then there will be value in stepping out into the real world. And so long as there is value in existing in the real world, people will pay for that.
- jvvw 4y ago
  Definitely. Going to university is also a very gentle way to leave home and grow up - you gradually learn to do things like budget, cook, find accommodation and so on while there is still support around you and have vacations when you can go home to your parents.

maegul 4y ago

Absolutely agree. And because of this, any fantasies from tech of easily disrupting education look rather naive … almost like they’re still in the mindset of the student trying to prove their intelligence. It seems then that the technical challenge is certification/assessment. Here, AI could play a role. If a machine can interactively and dynamically have a “conversation” with a person, that is randomised/unique and responsive to the student, all to assess how much they understand a topic, that’d probably do it. Combine it with a certain degree of oversight and random checking and provisions for review/appeal from “actual experts”, and you’d still have something that should scale pretty well beyond the university monopoly. An additional factor is the importance of cultural/mainstream perception. There’s a lot of “hacking” or gaming of the university assessment system, especially if you contrast the reality with the lofty and important goals of education and edification. I’d be interested to know how many, having gone through the system, really put that much faith in the quality of the “certificate”. I’ve certainly heard stories of some people/institutions wishing to also look at high school or secondary college results because they’re less likely to be “gamed” (though I have no idea how common at all this is).

analog31 4y ago
Assessment is a minor technical challenge, but finding people to assess might be a bigger challenge. Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. Everything is speculation unless that number can be nailed down. A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of the jobs that are being hired for. An example is the automation of engineering calculations by high level software such as CAD. I've gone through the system. I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.
- maegul 4y ago
  > Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. I'm not sure solitary self-learning is the only type of learning consistent with a disrupting higher education. If technology is to drive change here, I'd argue that a plurality of competing education/learning resources or services from which an individual can cater their choices to their own needs is what would be aimed for (or at least likely). > I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for. I agree. However, to my point about cultural perception, which I believe plays a large role in the state of higher education, what happens when higher education if universally seen as mostly "weeding"? Are the costs, inconveniences, cultural hegemonies/hangups/snobberies desirable and worth it?
  - analog31 4y ago
    The "weeder" course isn't intended to be symbolic. It tends to be a course that can only be offered after the students have gotten through the basic math cycle, i.e., 3rd year, and is heavily mathematical / theory oriented. I taught it once as an adjunct -- Electrodynamics in the EE department. Teachers are fully aware that a "weeder" course is a problem, and make a sincere effort to get as many students through as possible. But nonetheless it results in a lot of attrition.

ramesh31 4y ago

> No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem). State schools have a really unique potential here. There are many now that will confer an on-campus bachelors diploma for 100% remote degrees. The coursework is equally rigorous, administered by a single professor with small class sizes, and the exams are proctored. Any attempt at cheating can be easily snuffed out in this environment. MOOCs are a dead end in terms of providing this. But a state school is a respectable degree and I really hope they’ll extend this to STEM subjects soon.

thwayunion 4y ago

> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order: 1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields. 2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type. 3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.) Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well. Most institutions provide very little signalling value. Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment. And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system. American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs". edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)

HDThoreaun 4y ago
> Most institutions provide very little signalling value. Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.

nradov 4y ago

Doesn't that depend on the field of study? There is a fairly straightforward path for a motivated student to self-study to the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. But how would that work in, let's say, history? I took a fair number of history courses as electives and if I had just read books and watched videos I think I would have come away with a really skewed and incomplete education. Class discussions with instructors and peers gave me a much better perspective on many topics.

armchairhacker 4y ago

It may be useful to expand proctoring centers, and provide online universities where many exams are taken in-person and a lot of the grade is determined by assignments that can't easily be faked/cheated (e.g. randomly-generated questions, projects) Universities have pre-existing weight and "old money" recognition, but there's nothing inherently more "reliable" about them than online. A lot of people cheat in college, a lot of people take courses with inflated grades or courses which teach old concepts, and then have to learn everything again when they get their first job. It's absolutely true that if someone has a degree from a reputable college they very likely know their field, but if someone has an degree from a "reputable" online college then they also very likely know their field. It's not fair that in order to prove "acquired knowledge" you need to pay over $10K per semester and travel to an expensive college. It would be nice if we start to see people from online universities succeed in the workforce and build great things, then online degrees would likely be accepted more.

rdtwo 4y ago
Random does not prevent cheating. Cheating happens because students know the problem style ahead of time. It’s like doing leet code, vs knowing the question and then redoing it with a slightly different question
- dron57 4y ago
  Being prepared for the problem style ahead of time isn't cheating, it's just studying. If your claim is that this style of studying isn't preparing students for the real world where the problems cannot be easily predicted then I definitely agree. But cramming isn't cheating, students are just trying to succeed within the system.

syzarian 4y ago

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/08/13/how-does-virtual-learning-impact-students-in-higher-education/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...

makeitdouble 4y ago
You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem. I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.
- thwayunion 4y ago
  > I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is something that's often missed by people who don't need as much external feedback to learn. Literacy isn't enough. Is that how you meant it? I suspect, in either case, that this is a great Rorschach test of something or other.
  - 4y ago

m463 4y ago

What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person. is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.

Hermitian909 4y ago
> What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? The best predictor of being able to apply knowledge is better mastery of that knowledge and the context in which you are applying it, e.g. to be a creative mathematician you must know some things relating to the problems you're solving deeply. > is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful Most companies use the following signals 1. A track record of success 2. Intelligence 3. Consentiousness - the willingness to do required work even if you don't want to 4. Stress tolerance This is somewhat unsatisfying. One would hope you'd also try to detect attitudes or ideologies that blind you to entire solution spaces or being a massive jerk and alienating people around you.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way? You survived the 3-5 year ordeal and got your BSc or MSc, this implies you can apply some knowledge in some way. > in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person. The signal universities provide is not perfect, or even very strongly correlated with anyone's ability to excel in a specific domain. But it is somewhat positively correlated, which means using it as employment filter will weed out more bad than good candidates, which makes hiring cheaper and less risky. In other words: however bad the correlation is, it's already good enough to be useful. > is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? I worry this is an anti-inductive problem: i.e. if you can measure the right factors and predict if a person will be successful accurately enough, you can make people successful (look at it as closed-loop control problem) - but it's most likely cheaper to just make them seem successful instead. The measure becomes a target, and so eventually will cease to become a good measure. (In a sense, BSc and MSc titles are suffering from just that. They're no longer anywhere as strong a signal than they were 50 years ago.) > And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education. Unfortunately, the two goals - teaching for economic prospects, and educating for a rich and successful life in a more general sense - are at odds with each other.

julianeon 4y ago

> It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this. Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test. So this is your class population; now weed them out. Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test. Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them. You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try. Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Look at this from the perspective of the participants of your test: you're asking them to play in a lottery, whose odds are one to million, and the price of admission is years of long, hard work. No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk. But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.
MagnumOpus 4y ago
> I'm surprise it hasn't been tried. It has? You are describing every centralised college admissions exam, from the Chinese NCEE ("gaokao") to the Indian JEE-A or the French concours for admission to the better universities...

Spooky23 4y ago

Come on man, you’ve summoned the Stanford people who, like vegans, need to tell us why us peasants just don’t understand.

germinalphrase 4y ago

This base signaling of “minimal viable education” should really lead toward an assessment creation tool that would capture (and then reduce the necessity of) - the massive redundant labor of assessment content creation by educators. A significant portion of the content taught has been assessed a million different times. Much of that assessment content is locked up on static documents making reuse laborious. So - solve the educator’s pain point by allowing me to create an appropriately tailored set of assessment items instantly, curate items rapidly, and proctor the assessment immediately. US states spend something like 1-2 billion/yr on standardized testing. If(!) the veracity of the assessments can be established, move onto chopping the legs of the college board in an innovator’s dilemma situation by providing a lower cost ‘minimal viable education’ credential. Try to reduce the cost and necessity of low value higher education by reducing the perceived value of their credentialing abilities.

hammock 4y ago

>It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks That is not the point of a liberal higher education, though. Historically (for much longer than a century) people were tutored k-12 in their own homes, with their families and neighbors, and not in these government-run public schools. You could learn whatever you wanted from books at home, and a governess and key instructors. Still, you were sent off to college at a certain age, to be finished as either a man or a woman at a place like Harvard or a women’s college. The purpose was not principally to teach you math or anthropology that you couldn’t otherwise learn yourself (though you would learn some math and anthropology). There was another purpose

MandieD 4y ago
"... and a governess and key instructors." If your family was wealthy enough for you to be economically inactive as a youth, and to pay for said governess and instructors. Higher education was for the rich, too. As you said, a different purpose, mostly social (definitely social for the wealthy young women). All those little, often church-supported, colleges and land-grant state universities and teachers' colleges that sprang up all over the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That was a revolution: higher education for the non-rich, and mostly for practical purposes.

soferio 4y ago

As for signalling, “The Case Against Education” by Bryan Caplan is a crisply argued case that signalling is >50% at least of what is going on.

rrrrrrrrrrrr2 4y ago
My coworkers were talking about this at lunch the other day. An experienced tech guy asked all the employees there what they thought about whether a 4-year degree should be a requirement for tech jobs. All the new grads of course shit on their educations. A couple more senior people were of course more hesitant. But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0. I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was (1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way, (2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and (3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech. I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.
baandang 4y ago
I would say 90%. I would contend the main problem is we really don't believe in education as a society. Most people don't even believe that becoming more educated makes you "smarter". "Smart" is this CPU clock speed you naturally have and then "education" is running the cpu through various benchmarks. School is just standardization of the benchmarks so it can't be cheap and freely available. We don't want everyone to join the guild. As a society we want joining the guild to be as prohibitively expensive as possible while pretending we wish the guild could be open and free. All a racket and bullshit for 99% of the population.

randomdata 4y ago

> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. Importantly, though, the topic here is higher education, not education. Higher education refers to a type of business. And the business of higher education isn't in the business of education at all, but rather in the business of socialization. The value proposition is exposure to other, generally like-minded, people in which to engage with and form bonds with, particularly with respect to mating. While at some level something like this very forum could disrupt that there is something missing. Tech hasn't solved for the "human touch" and until then there will be value in stepping out into the real world. And so long as there is value in existing in the real world, people will pay for that.

jvvw 4y ago
Definitely. Going to university is also a very gentle way to leave home and grow up - you gradually learn to do things like budget, cook, find accommodation and so on while there is still support around you and have vacations when you can go home to your parents.