13 ms·

Attention Caplanites: School Is Less Wasteful Than You Think

65 points by telotortium 3y ago

onos 3y ago
I think I read somewhere that people who apply to Harvard and don’t get in end up having similar incomes to those who did get in. So I at least think elite schools often are “taking credit” for the pre-existing high quality of their admits, and they often don’t provide much value add these kids couldn’t get elsewhere.
- aetherson 3y ago
  I mean, it is clearly the case that ultra-selective schools are benefiting a lot from the preexisting quality of their students, and they wouldn't obtain the same outcomes by taking a random high school senior. But the students who apply to Harvard and fail to get in probably go to schools that are only a little less prestigious than Harvard, instead. Like, I didn't apply to Harvard, but I did apply to Princeton -- and got rejected. I went to Williams College instead. If my income is similar to a Princeton's student's post-graduation, is that because I did it all on my own, or is it because Williams is also a highly prestigious school that provides similar benefits to Princeton, albeit perhaps a bit less?
  - detourdog 3y ago
    Williamstown is disproportionally represented on HN comapered to its populous. None of of us townies worry about the future of Williams grads. Steve Case and George Steinbrenner both managed.
    - tnecniv 3y ago
      I don’t know, have you seen the Yankees this year?
      - detourdog 3y ago
        It killed George.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    Also, without context, the smartest people at Harvard could end up being career poets, while the rejected applicants could all end up as MIT engineers and Wharton business majors. While an extreme example, even the elite universities have academic focuses, attract students interested those, and accept students based on how strongly they want those interests represented in the student body.
- wmf 3y ago
  I think that's the human capital mentioned in the article.
- tarboreus 3y ago
  You're getting it wrong, it's that people who get in, but don't go, have similar outcomes. That suggests that a lot of the value of the signal is in the inital filter, which seems like what you're saying.
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  >> people who apply to Harvard and don’t get in end up having similar incomes to those who did get in No. People who apply to Harvard and do get in, but decide to go to some other college do as well as those apply to Harvard and do get in and go to Harvard. The ability to get in to Harvard predicts outcomes, actually going there does not predict outcomes.
analyticcadep 3y ago
[dead]
nosefurhairdo 3y ago
On signaling != waste: Of course signaling is not wasteful. Caplan, like any good economist, would readily agree (prices as signals is a cornerstone in microeconomic theory). Employers need a mechanism to identify who is worth hiring, which for entry level jobs is typically the college degree. The problem is that a college degree is an extraordinarily expensive signaling device to obtain, and in a population saturated with college degrees they become less meaningful, and those without degrees have no chance at competing even if they would be better suited for a particular job. To me, The Case Against Education is a prompt to identify or create more efficient signals. In regular conversation it seems like most people agree that college is too expensive and really you're just in it for the "piece of paper" at the end, yet when you formalize the arguments folks get defensive and will pontificate on the intangible value of a liberal arts education.
- zdragnar 3y ago
  Colleges and universities in the US also advertise job placement rates for their various programs. Any argument for the intangible benefits of a liberal arts education must, at minimum, recognize that these are all secondary benefits. Any degree without a clear path to a well paying career is, based on the cost of tuition, a luxury good. This is true regardless of whether the tuition is paid by loans or taxes.
  - sh34r 3y ago
    There is no good reason why tuition is as expensive as it is. Georgia Tech offers a $7k online MS in CS. Community college classes cost hundreds of dollars. You could study in Germany as an unsubsidized international student for a fraction of the cost of a U.S. four year university. The problem is that America is infested with rent seeking parasites who have turned every social good into a scam. Our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, and yet we have a lower life expectancy than Cuba. We have the most expensive education system in the world, with little to show for it. Why are we devaluing education itself, just because far too many colleges are being run by despicable businessmen? Why are we accepting their rigged game as fixed? Boomers went to college for next to nothing. Gen X didn’t have to pay that much either. The neoliberal corruption of higher education, from a social good into a scam, is a very recent phenomenon. The root of the rot is all the pointless add-on services. Colleges don’t need to run dorms, meal plans, health centers, or any of that. The only thing that should be offered is academics. 18 year olds can go to war. They can manage to live independently, and the ones who can’t will receive Darwin Awards.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jkhdigital 3y ago
Some good points here, although frankly academic rigor has fallen even further out of favor in the five years since Caplan’s article so that would probably strengthen his case. Painting higher education with such a broad brush is guaranteed to create an intractable debate. There are students for whom college is a necessary and beneficial step towards a successful career, and students for whom college becomes an albatross of debt with little tangible benefit. Identifying the conditions which give rise to the worst-case outcomes seems like a more worthwhile course of inquiry.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wisty 3y ago
> Conformists do what they’re told and don’t look for ways to skirt the rules. They’re more likely to assimilate into corporate culture and are easier to monitor, motivate, and predict in a wide variety of circumstances. When it comes right down to it, you can probably pay them less for doing the same amount of work. > But while Caplanites readily assert this point to explain why the signal from education can’t easily be replaced by market alternatives, they conspicuously neglect the challenge it poses to their broader assault on schooling’s societal worth: so long as otherwise useless and arbitrary curricula succeed at teaching students to conform, they still contribute to human capital formation. A counter argument - schools do not teach students to play by the rules (even if they want to), they teach students how to cheat and not get caught. A business doesn't want employees who can hit KPIs by gaming the system, a business wants employees who will earnestly do their jobs in a way that improves their numbers (and unless you're in sales, there's very rarely a good KPI). The anti-Caplan article then explains that cheating can be rampant. I don't think this is the type of conformity most businesses want (even if they might end up rewarding it). I agree with the argument against Fadeout though - students might forget everything they learnt at college because they never really need it, but retain what they learnt in high school because they needed to use it in college. There could be an argument to make college shorter. Would a 2 year degree be any worse than a 4 year degree, assuming the students are aiming for a career where don't need any of the more specialised skills a professional degree would require? Australia does fine with 3 year degrees, and I don't think anyone would advocate for 5 year generalist degrees (with a straight face) so what's so magic about 4 year degrees?
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Also, regarding conformism, an undergraduate degree is about learning the basics of a field. Undergraduate classes are not the cutting edge of thought in the area by and large. It’s similar to learning to play an instrument or paint. The masters know how to break the rules because they know all the rules and know when and how it is interesting to break them. I personally can’t just put three tones on a canvas and make it like a Rothko or play with dissonance like Ornette Coleman. They can experiment successfully because they know how to very intentionally break a rule.
- taeric 3y ago
kadenwolff 3y ago
I feel like a lot of the criticisms made here could be goal-factored out. I think Caplan would agree with them. But I think a lot of the things that are suggested would be missed out on (teaching conformity, peer groups, etc) could be replaced by significantly better alternatives than schooling.
tnecniv 3y ago
After reading both the blog post and the contained link to the article published in The Atlantic, I have some reactions that reflect thoughts I’ve felt about our education system. While I have a PhD, I have largely felt this way since I was a junior in undergrad. I would also like to preface this by saying I just finished a beer league softball game and am thus tired and had a few beers. First, I think our K-12 education fails Americans in a lot of ways. Many classes are taught following some traditional pedagogy that doesn’t provide students with the actually useful skills they need in life. I went to a highly ranked high school, aced all my standardized tests, AP exams, and attended a top college, but I didn’t realize how high school failed me until I struggled in college during my early years. The two examples I think about the most are math and writing. For math, the only proofs we ever did were in geometry class, using the two column style. We did not explicitly learn how formal logic worked, nor did we learn how to write “paragraph” proofs which are what every professor and math textbook expects you to understand. Every proof was a two column proof because, I assume, that was much easier to grade. However, more importantly, we did not prove _anything_ after geometry class. Because I was “good at math,” I took geometry my freshman year of high school, and took AP Calculus BC by the time I graduated. Despite doing well in those classes, I struggled in both college-level calculus, differential equations, and the “discrete math for computer science” class. If we were asked to prove something, I basically didn’t know how to do it (it had been three years since I even thought about proofs!). If it was a computational problem, I could only do it via memorizing an algorithm because I didn’t have the built up mathematical familiarity to figure things out on the fly. I spent a summer basically going back to basics on my own when I felt like I had to in order to learn the topics in which I was interested, and on the other end I really felt robbed. I didn’t feel smarter than I was in high school, I just felt like I hadn’t been prepared to do these proofs nor had they motivated why I should care about a lot of the math we learned. Instead of spending months on algorithms for solving integrals, basic analysis would have been both more useful and better explained where these rules were coming from. The curriculum past geometry, containing trigonometry, pre-calculus, Calculus AB, and Calculus BC felt like it could have been hugely compressed (on day 1, we were told the first half of BC would just be a review of AB, and I don’t even remember what we covered in pre-calculus beyond explaining what a function is). My period of self-study ended, I was much more academically successful, had no further problems with math, better appreciated the subject, and overall felt more capable of using math to solve problems. Second, with writing, we were highly encouraged to just churn out pages. I was writing a 10 page history essay every week. While our teachers were fairly good at getting us to go do research, the only way we could hit the expected page count was to write things in the most drawn out and convoluted way possible. Even then, I still felt like I had a cheat code others didn’t in my class by going to a physical library and checking out academic books on the topic instead of relying on two books and a bunch of internet sources. It felt like I was able to find more relevant information for my arguments than half of my peers. In college, I had to totally relearn how to structure and write an essay because the challenge switched from filling pages to writing the best argument possible in a small number of pages. In this instance, I felt like I got a good basic education in high school of how to analyze history, but a terrible education of how to articulate my analysis. Ultimately, my feeling is that high school fails us. Success in college and beyond required me unlearning the compilation of bad habits that made me very successful in high school. I’m sure that I had peers who came in and were ready to go right off the bat, but I doubt I was alone in this. In fact, from the amount of people I have seen online complaining about how they should have learned how to file taxes in high school (like they’d retain that information), I feel like I was better off than a lot of people. Theoretically, the liberal arts education our K-12 program aspires to give students should equip graduates with the skills to conduct the basic research (I.e., Google these days), understand the instructions (critical reading), and fill out the appropriate paperwork (basic math). Moreover, many jobs don’t require beyond those skills as a foundation to learn the task-specific skills you learn on the job and not in college anyway. I’ve even known a lawyer or two that maintained a quality high school grad would have no problem with law school. My conclusion is that, in additional to social signaling, college has become a way to compensate for a poor K-12 education. A lot of your tuition is spent fixing poor skills as opposed to broadening horizons. A college graduate with a decent GPA likely needs far less handholding than an 18 year old fresh out of high school, and that’s highly desirable to companies when hiring. This ends my slightly drunk, sunburned rant.
cm2012 3y ago
As I've gotten older and seen more and more research the more cynical I've gotten. There's so few interventions that affect student aptitude.
alfiedotwtf 3y ago
I haven't read what Caplan has written, but whenever I read or talk to people advocating against public education in America (note: I'm not in America), it's always been a thinly veiled pretext for Bible education for school kids i.e if you can homeschool your kids, then you can teach the the Bible. If you send them to a public school, you can't.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- DougMerritt 3y ago
  I'm American and I have pretty much the same impression.
sh34r 3y ago
It is beyond sad how everyone seems to just accept that college is job training now. Of course, it’s a logical response because the neoliberal university saddles students with far too much debt. 90% of what an American university does today is useless waste. Most classes are taught by starving grad students and adjuncts. Running the courses themselves are a rounding error on budgets. Administrators are robbing the kids blind. Education is an afterthought at many institutions. You don’t have to look very far for ways out of this crisis. Look to European universities and their four-figure semester tuition bills, even for foreigners. Look at community colleges, which don’t have dorms, lazy rivers, hundreds of parasitic administrators who do nothing, or Kafkaesque admissions processes. Look at how much more affordable online courses are, from highly respected public universities, when you excise all the useless overhead.
- sfpotter 3y ago
  I think an interesting model would be a college which is “worker owned and operated” in the sense that the faculty must take in all of the administrative tasks themselves, or at least a significant portion of it. No one wants this kind of task interfering with more interesting work (teaching, mentoring, research), so there would be strong incentives to minimize waste and simplify process.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    That is the university model unless I’m misunderstanding. Faculty members hold regular meetings and votes among themselves on policy, who to hire / appoint as dean of X, etc.
    - etempleton 3y ago
      That is the old University model. The problem with this model is it is slow to adapt and slower to react to organizational or business challenges. When faced with enrollment or financial challenges there becomes a sort of political gridlock that can and often occurs under this model. The administrator or professional management model is more efficient, but relies on the right people in the right roles and admin bloat can occur.
taeric 3y ago
> In contrast, people I’ve met in the working world tend to have comparatively > little time and interest for teaching or mentorship. Apart from the many > individual coworkers and bosses that expect you to show up and figure things > out with minimal direction, there is a more general atmosphere of “we’re > paying you” that is less conducive to asking questions relative to the > classroom or office hours. This feels to be a weak argument against on the job training. I'd go so far as to say it is gross negligence in how little folks realize a lot of doing your job is a performance and best taught to someone. We can easily see this in many entry level jobs. Starting any fast food job, you would expect someone to train you on how to prepare the food and package it for delivery. Sadly, I can't think of many times after that that I was given training. Yes, many on call rotations would have a shadowing period, but often that was less training and more venting from whoever you were shadowing. Why do we in the software industry think that teaching and learning is so far removed from the jobs that we have? I've been a skeptic of "mentorship" things where the idea seems to be "hope that something comes out of it," but at least there is hope in those ideas. The alternative seems to be to hope that the current styles and ideas will work. With the goal of finding a style and idea that you can hire for and then push all responsibility onto the folks walking in the door that day.
kebsup 3y ago
I'm currently finishing Msc. in computer science at an average European university, and it was knowledge-wise just a complete waste of time. The only thing I'll take from these two years: - Living, studiyng and working in Western country compared to my home country of Czechia was culturally enriching let's say. - Eramsus was fun, more travel! But if I wanted to maximize my knowledge about computers, doing Coursera and working on interesting projects on my own would 100% give better results.

65 points by telotortium 3y ago

onos 3y ago

I think I read somewhere that people who apply to Harvard and don’t get in end up having similar incomes to those who did get in. So I at least think elite schools often are “taking credit” for the pre-existing high quality of their admits, and they often don’t provide much value add these kids couldn’t get elsewhere.

aetherson 3y ago
I mean, it is clearly the case that ultra-selective schools are benefiting a lot from the preexisting quality of their students, and they wouldn't obtain the same outcomes by taking a random high school senior. But the students who apply to Harvard and fail to get in probably go to schools that are only a little less prestigious than Harvard, instead. Like, I didn't apply to Harvard, but I did apply to Princeton -- and got rejected. I went to Williams College instead. If my income is similar to a Princeton's student's post-graduation, is that because I did it all on my own, or is it because Williams is also a highly prestigious school that provides similar benefits to Princeton, albeit perhaps a bit less?
- detourdog 3y ago
  Williamstown is disproportionally represented on HN comapered to its populous. None of of us townies worry about the future of Williams grads. Steve Case and George Steinbrenner both managed.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    I don’t know, have you seen the Yankees this year?
    - detourdog 3y ago
      It killed George.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  Also, without context, the smartest people at Harvard could end up being career poets, while the rejected applicants could all end up as MIT engineers and Wharton business majors. While an extreme example, even the elite universities have academic focuses, attract students interested those, and accept students based on how strongly they want those interests represented in the student body.
wmf 3y ago
I think that's the human capital mentioned in the article.
tarboreus 3y ago
You're getting it wrong, it's that people who get in, but don't go, have similar outcomes. That suggests that a lot of the value of the signal is in the inital filter, which seems like what you're saying.
rufus_foreman 3y ago
>> people who apply to Harvard and don’t get in end up having similar incomes to those who did get in No. People who apply to Harvard and do get in, but decide to go to some other college do as well as those apply to Harvard and do get in and go to Harvard. The ability to get in to Harvard predicts outcomes, actually going there does not predict outcomes.

analyticcadep 3y ago

[dead]

nosefurhairdo 3y ago

On signaling != waste: Of course signaling is not wasteful. Caplan, like any good economist, would readily agree (prices as signals is a cornerstone in microeconomic theory). Employers need a mechanism to identify who is worth hiring, which for entry level jobs is typically the college degree. The problem is that a college degree is an extraordinarily expensive signaling device to obtain, and in a population saturated with college degrees they become less meaningful, and those without degrees have no chance at competing even if they would be better suited for a particular job. To me, The Case Against Education is a prompt to identify or create more efficient signals. In regular conversation it seems like most people agree that college is too expensive and really you're just in it for the "piece of paper" at the end, yet when you formalize the arguments folks get defensive and will pontificate on the intangible value of a liberal arts education.

zdragnar 3y ago
Colleges and universities in the US also advertise job placement rates for their various programs. Any argument for the intangible benefits of a liberal arts education must, at minimum, recognize that these are all secondary benefits. Any degree without a clear path to a well paying career is, based on the cost of tuition, a luxury good. This is true regardless of whether the tuition is paid by loans or taxes.
- sh34r 3y ago
  There is no good reason why tuition is as expensive as it is. Georgia Tech offers a $7k online MS in CS. Community college classes cost hundreds of dollars. You could study in Germany as an unsubsidized international student for a fraction of the cost of a U.S. four year university. The problem is that America is infested with rent seeking parasites who have turned every social good into a scam. Our healthcare system is the most expensive in the world, and yet we have a lower life expectancy than Cuba. We have the most expensive education system in the world, with little to show for it. Why are we devaluing education itself, just because far too many colleges are being run by despicable businessmen? Why are we accepting their rigged game as fixed? Boomers went to college for next to nothing. Gen X didn’t have to pay that much either. The neoliberal corruption of higher education, from a social good into a scam, is a very recent phenomenon. The root of the rot is all the pointless add-on services. Colleges don’t need to run dorms, meal plans, health centers, or any of that. The only thing that should be offered is academics. 18 year olds can go to war. They can manage to live independently, and the ones who can’t will receive Darwin Awards.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jkhdigital 3y ago

Some good points here, although frankly academic rigor has fallen even further out of favor in the five years since Caplan’s article so that would probably strengthen his case. Painting higher education with such a broad brush is guaranteed to create an intractable debate. There are students for whom college is a necessary and beneficial step towards a successful career, and students for whom college becomes an albatross of debt with little tangible benefit. Identifying the conditions which give rise to the worst-case outcomes seems like a more worthwhile course of inquiry.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wisty 3y ago

> Conformists do what they’re told and don’t look for ways to skirt the rules. They’re more likely to assimilate into corporate culture and are easier to monitor, motivate, and predict in a wide variety of circumstances. When it comes right down to it, you can probably pay them less for doing the same amount of work. > But while Caplanites readily assert this point to explain why the signal from education can’t easily be replaced by market alternatives, they conspicuously neglect the challenge it poses to their broader assault on schooling’s societal worth: so long as otherwise useless and arbitrary curricula succeed at teaching students to conform, they still contribute to human capital formation. A counter argument - schools do not teach students to play by the rules (even if they want to), they teach students how to cheat and not get caught. A business doesn't want employees who can hit KPIs by gaming the system, a business wants employees who will earnestly do their jobs in a way that improves their numbers (and unless you're in sales, there's very rarely a good KPI). The anti-Caplan article then explains that cheating can be rampant. I don't think this is the type of conformity most businesses want (even if they might end up rewarding it). I agree with the argument against Fadeout though - students might forget everything they learnt at college because they never really need it, but retain what they learnt in high school because they needed to use it in college. There could be an argument to make college shorter. Would a 2 year degree be any worse than a 4 year degree, assuming the students are aiming for a career where don't need any of the more specialised skills a professional degree would require? Australia does fine with 3 year degrees, and I don't think anyone would advocate for 5 year generalist degrees (with a straight face) so what's so magic about 4 year degrees?

tnecniv 3y ago
Also, regarding conformism, an undergraduate degree is about learning the basics of a field. Undergraduate classes are not the cutting edge of thought in the area by and large. It’s similar to learning to play an instrument or paint. The masters know how to break the rules because they know all the rules and know when and how it is interesting to break them. I personally can’t just put three tones on a canvas and make it like a Rothko or play with dissonance like Ornette Coleman. They can experiment successfully because they know how to very intentionally break a rule.
taeric 3y ago

kadenwolff 3y ago

I feel like a lot of the criticisms made here could be goal-factored out. I think Caplan would agree with them. But I think a lot of the things that are suggested would be missed out on (teaching conformity, peer groups, etc) could be replaced by significantly better alternatives than schooling.

tnecniv 3y ago

After reading both the blog post and the contained link to the article published in The Atlantic, I have some reactions that reflect thoughts I’ve felt about our education system. While I have a PhD, I have largely felt this way since I was a junior in undergrad. I would also like to preface this by saying I just finished a beer league softball game and am thus tired and had a few beers. First, I think our K-12 education fails Americans in a lot of ways. Many classes are taught following some traditional pedagogy that doesn’t provide students with the actually useful skills they need in life. I went to a highly ranked high school, aced all my standardized tests, AP exams, and attended a top college, but I didn’t realize how high school failed me until I struggled in college during my early years. The two examples I think about the most are math and writing. For math, the only proofs we ever did were in geometry class, using the two column style. We did not explicitly learn how formal logic worked, nor did we learn how to write “paragraph” proofs which are what every professor and math textbook expects you to understand. Every proof was a two column proof because, I assume, that was much easier to grade. However, more importantly, we did not prove _anything_ after geometry class. Because I was “good at math,” I took geometry my freshman year of high school, and took AP Calculus BC by the time I graduated. Despite doing well in those classes, I struggled in both college-level calculus, differential equations, and the “discrete math for computer science” class. If we were asked to prove something, I basically didn’t know how to do it (it had been three years since I even thought about proofs!). If it was a computational problem, I could only do it via memorizing an algorithm because I didn’t have the built up mathematical familiarity to figure things out on the fly. I spent a summer basically going back to basics on my own when I felt like I had to in order to learn the topics in which I was interested, and on the other end I really felt robbed. I didn’t feel smarter than I was in high school, I just felt like I hadn’t been prepared to do these proofs nor had they motivated why I should care about a lot of the math we learned. Instead of spending months on algorithms for solving integrals, basic analysis would have been both more useful and better explained where these rules were coming from. The curriculum past geometry, containing trigonometry, pre-calculus, Calculus AB, and Calculus BC felt like it could have been hugely compressed (on day 1, we were told the first half of BC would just be a review of AB, and I don’t even remember what we covered in pre-calculus beyond explaining what a function is). My period of self-study ended, I was much more academically successful, had no further problems with math, better appreciated the subject, and overall felt more capable of using math to solve problems. Second, with writing, we were highly encouraged to just churn out pages. I was writing a 10 page history essay every week. While our teachers were fairly good at getting us to go do research, the only way we could hit the expected page count was to write things in the most drawn out and convoluted way possible. Even then, I still felt like I had a cheat code others didn’t in my class by going to a physical library and checking out academic books on the topic instead of relying on two books and a bunch of internet sources. It felt like I was able to find more relevant information for my arguments than half of my peers. In college, I had to totally relearn how to structure and write an essay because the challenge switched from filling pages to writing the best argument possible in a small number of pages. In this instance, I felt like I got a good basic education in high school of how to analyze history, but a terrible education of how to articulate my analysis. Ultimately, my feeling is that high school fails us. Success in college and beyond required me unlearning the compilation of bad habits that made me very successful in high school. I’m sure that I had peers who came in and were ready to go right off the bat, but I doubt I was alone in this. In fact, from the amount of people I have seen online complaining about how they should have learned how to file taxes in high school (like they’d retain that information), I feel like I was better off than a lot of people. Theoretically, the liberal arts education our K-12 program aspires to give students should equip graduates with the skills to conduct the basic research (I.e., Google these days), understand the instructions (critical reading), and fill out the appropriate paperwork (basic math). Moreover, many jobs don’t require beyond those skills as a foundation to learn the task-specific skills you learn on the job and not in college anyway. I’ve even known a lawyer or two that maintained a quality high school grad would have no problem with law school. My conclusion is that, in additional to social signaling, college has become a way to compensate for a poor K-12 education. A lot of your tuition is spent fixing poor skills as opposed to broadening horizons. A college graduate with a decent GPA likely needs far less handholding than an 18 year old fresh out of high school, and that’s highly desirable to companies when hiring. This ends my slightly drunk, sunburned rant.

cm2012 3y ago

As I've gotten older and seen more and more research the more cynical I've gotten. There's so few interventions that affect student aptitude.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

I haven't read what Caplan has written, but whenever I read or talk to people advocating against public education in America (note: I'm not in America), it's always been a thinly veiled pretext for Bible education for school kids i.e if you can homeschool your kids, then you can teach the the Bible. If you send them to a public school, you can't.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DougMerritt 3y ago
I'm American and I have pretty much the same impression.

sh34r 3y ago

It is beyond sad how everyone seems to just accept that college is job training now. Of course, it’s a logical response because the neoliberal university saddles students with far too much debt. 90% of what an American university does today is useless waste. Most classes are taught by starving grad students and adjuncts. Running the courses themselves are a rounding error on budgets. Administrators are robbing the kids blind. Education is an afterthought at many institutions. You don’t have to look very far for ways out of this crisis. Look to European universities and their four-figure semester tuition bills, even for foreigners. Look at community colleges, which don’t have dorms, lazy rivers, hundreds of parasitic administrators who do nothing, or Kafkaesque admissions processes. Look at how much more affordable online courses are, from highly respected public universities, when you excise all the useless overhead.

sfpotter 3y ago
I think an interesting model would be a college which is “worker owned and operated” in the sense that the faculty must take in all of the administrative tasks themselves, or at least a significant portion of it. No one wants this kind of task interfering with more interesting work (teaching, mentoring, research), so there would be strong incentives to minimize waste and simplify process.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  That is the university model unless I’m misunderstanding. Faculty members hold regular meetings and votes among themselves on policy, who to hire / appoint as dean of X, etc.
  - etempleton 3y ago
    That is the old University model. The problem with this model is it is slow to adapt and slower to react to organizational or business challenges. When faced with enrollment or financial challenges there becomes a sort of political gridlock that can and often occurs under this model. The administrator or professional management model is more efficient, but relies on the right people in the right roles and admin bloat can occur.

taeric 3y ago

> In contrast, people I’ve met in the working world tend to have comparatively > little time and interest for teaching or mentorship. Apart from the many > individual coworkers and bosses that expect you to show up and figure things > out with minimal direction, there is a more general atmosphere of “we’re > paying you” that is less conducive to asking questions relative to the > classroom or office hours. This feels to be a weak argument against on the job training. I'd go so far as to say it is gross negligence in how little folks realize a lot of doing your job is a performance and best taught to someone. We can easily see this in many entry level jobs. Starting any fast food job, you would expect someone to train you on how to prepare the food and package it for delivery. Sadly, I can't think of many times after that that I was given training. Yes, many on call rotations would have a shadowing period, but often that was less training and more venting from whoever you were shadowing. Why do we in the software industry think that teaching and learning is so far removed from the jobs that we have? I've been a skeptic of "mentorship" things where the idea seems to be "hope that something comes out of it," but at least there is hope in those ideas. The alternative seems to be to hope that the current styles and ideas will work. With the goal of finding a style and idea that you can hire for and then push all responsibility onto the folks walking in the door that day.

kebsup 3y ago

I'm currently finishing Msc. in computer science at an average European university, and it was knowledge-wise just a complete waste of time. The only thing I'll take from these two years: - Living, studiyng and working in Western country compared to my home country of Czechia was culturally enriching let's say. - Eramsus was fun, more travel! But if I wanted to maximize my knowledge about computers, doing Coursera and working on interesting projects on my own would 100% give better results.