6 ms·

Jailbreaking the Degree

21 points by iProject 15y ago

dkrich 15y ago
I don't think it's a coincidence that the major proponents of doing away with traditional higher education and questioning the value of a college degree are people with at least one degree (in many instances advanced degrees as well) from very prestigious institutions. They believe that in a practical sense, what you really need to know to perform you can gain more efficiently by doing. They ask "Who knows better than somebody with expensive degrees how worthless they are?" I completely disagree with that and I believe the opposite is true. Only people without degrees can speak reliably about whether they regret the decision or not. They actually put themselves on the line. I'm not convinced when I hear people with degrees say that they wish they had known that they didn't need them before or that they would have been just as well without them. That's like somebody who paid for flood insurance claiming "who knows better than I how worthless flood insurance is?" Perhaps the guy down the street who didn't buy it and lost his house. Edit: And to the author's point about iTunes vs buying full albums- that analogy is faulty. There have been community colleges around for many, many years, but the reality is that companies just don't value individual coursework as favorably as an entire degree, particularly one from a prestigious school. The purchaser of a song has very different objectives than a hirer. A song purchaser wants one song and does not want to pay ten times the price to buy an entire album which might have three songs that he likes. Clearly, single purchases are more efficient. But when it comes to hiring, there is no added cost. If I am hiring for a position with a stated salary, I want the most qualified person I can find. If I can hire a guy with three degrees in Computer Science from MIT, I don't really care about the guy with the Microsoft and Cisco certification, even if those are things that are precisely what you need to know on the job. College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. If you pull back and decide you are going to turn down MIT and go learn just the skills you need for your job, there are going to be 5,000 people lined up behind you ready to saddle themselves with debt and work through four years of college to get the degree and you will facing an uphill battle. So in the case of iTunes, a comparable situation is if I had $0.99 to spend on a song, and had hundreds of full albums with that song offered for my $0.99. In that case, I am not going to buy the single song.
- wisty 15y ago
  > College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. People always say this. If it were true, it could be done far cheaper.
  - dkrich 15y ago
    It may be true that it could be done for cheaper if the hiring teams bought into a new system. But the course is really set by the hiring team. There was a time when you only had to study legal books on your own and pass a bar exam to become an attorney. Law schools didn't exist until the turn of the century. Nowadays you can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree, and to get a top job, you have to have a degree from a top law school. This is not because the fundamentals being taught at each school are different. Rather law firms know which schools are hard to get into and simply go there to hire their talent because they figure those people are the best. Hopeful attorneys see those firms and want in, so naturally, they want to get into the top law schools. Those who don't, trickle down to the less prestigious schools where the firms that can't afford to compete with the top firms recruit, and so on. This is basically what drives the obsession with higher education in the U.S. whether it is business, law, medicine, or engineering. Now whether a career in a prestigious firm is something you should actually want is a completely different conversation, but allowing that it is something a lot of the most eligible college graduates aspire to, the system will sustain itself.
    - Turing_Machine 15y ago
      "can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree" It depends on what you mean by a career. There are still a few states that let you sit for the bar exam without going to law school (California is one, IIRC). That actually makes a certain degree of sense, since it's widely accepted that passing the bar exam is a MUCH more difficult hurdle than completing law school. If you just want a career as a family lawyer, that'd certainly be a low-debt option.
      - WildUtah 15y ago
nickpinkston 15y ago
Anyone else getting an OAUTH error when they try to sign-up with http://degreed.com http://degreed.com (in the article)?
- davidblake 15y ago
  @Nick thanks for the heads up. It is isolated to users without a live FB session. We are fixing it ASAP.
evoxed 15y ago
> Post the photo to our Facebook Page or Twitter with the caption... Guess I'll just have to wait this one out for now. Hopefully they'll open it up soon.
kijin 15y ago
> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid. That's a problem with the curriculum, not the overall concept of a 4-year degree. There are schools that bundle useless courses as part of the required curriculum just because a tenured prof wants to teach it in a large auditorium. But other schools encourage students to build their own curricula with the courses that offer the most value to them. Brown University, for example, has been doing this for decades. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way toward catering to the needs and desires of each student. I have two (soon to be three) degrees in some combination of humanities and social sciences, and I've thoroughly enjoyed all but one or two of the dozens of courses I've taken so far. I've been fortunate because all the schools I've attended have been quite flexible in their course-taking requirements. I wish most students at many other universities enjoyed the same amount of choices. On the other hand, there is something to be said in favor of requiring engineering students, for example, to take a few courses in the humanities and social sciences. If you think you don't need to know philosophy or history to be a good engineer, you may find yourself at a disadvantage when dealing with today's complicated techno-socio-political issues. I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical and historical context. Sure, you could study history outside of a college. High school really should teach critical thinking skills. But the reality is that most people would never even get a chance to think critically about topics in the humanities and social sciences if they weren't required to do so by their college's curriculum. The same goes for requiring humanities students to take introductory courses in math and science. Honestly, every college student should also be required to take a course in practical computer use unless they can demonstrate that they already know the stuff. EDIT Clarification: There are plenty of other reasons to advocate a reconsideration of the value of higher education as a whole, but a poorly designed curriculum isn't the most important reason. That one can be fixed without ditching the college altogether.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical and historical context. The parts of the old Soviet Union and China?
_delirium 15y ago
> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? One guess is that a reason employers value degrees is precisely because it indicates a willingness/ability to successfully complete tasks that you might not personally value, but which are required in your institutional role. After all, corporations are institutions that plan to require you to do things if they hire you, some of which you might not value. A somewhat less meta answer is that employers trust standard curricula enough to not be interested in doing case-by-case evaluation of alternatives. So if one person has a "4-year accredited electrical engineering degree", and another person has passed a selection of EE courses they chose themselves, the company will probably prefer the 1st. Evaluating the 2nd candidate requires the company to decide whether that selection of courses constitutes a good EE curriculum (versus, for example, the student having avoided all the hard or math-heavy courses), and most companies don't know or want to know how to evaluate student-customized curricula on a case-by-case basis.
Turing_Machine 15y ago
"Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value?" Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"? That's not to say that higher education doesn't need reform (or quite possibly wholesale replacement). It does, desperately. I just question whether a person who (by definition) doesn't possess a certain piece of knowledge is a good judge of the value of that knowledge. I'm put in mind of my undergrad CS degree -- lots of bitching about how the courses weren't taught in C++ (the "hot" language of the day). Some of the professors even used weird stuff like Lisp! Of course, the professors had been around long enough to see "hot" languages come and go, and were choosing a language thatillustrated the concept under discussion well (which could be Lisp, could be C, could be assembly language, depending on what it was). Of the classmates with whom I'm still in contact, I can't think of many whose primary language for employment is C++.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"? Perhaps, but he's certainly a better judge than academics who's continued employment depends on getting him to pay for their services. At least his incentives are properly aligned. When I was in college, my judgement was that the humanities and literature would be useless while advanced math would come in handy. Nothing has happened in the past 10 years to convince me this was incorrect.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Judging by what electives students choose when they have the option, anything with the word "math" anywhere in the vicinity is the first thing most students would skip if they didn't have to take it! If many CS students I've known had their way, all mathematical and theoretical content would be removed from the CS curriculum, and replaced with "real-world" programming classes. Less statistics, discrete math, and computability theory; more node.js, Ruby, and advanced git. Separately from that, on your other comment, I've run into a surprisingly large number of people whose non-technical curricula have had a strong positive impact on their technical jobs. For example, Richard Evans, the AI lead on Black & White, Sims 3, and now a new startup recently acquired by Linden Labs, has a philosophy B.A., and credits it with being core to much of his AI design (his current system is based on a logic modeled on Wittgenstein's view of social interactions).
vectorpush 15y ago
As far as credentials, it seems to me like an "online" degree is worse than no degree at all. There is a horrible stigma regarding the quality of online degrees and doubt regarding the judgement of those who pursue them. This perception can definitely change in the future, but I suspect it won't be for a very long time.
- hv23 15y ago
  Historically, yes-- due to the likes of University of Phoenix, etc.-- but this is already changing as large, well-respected institutions like Stanford and MIT embrace different methods of online learning. Sure, taking an online course (or series of courses) from Stanford/MIT doesn't have the same perceived value as doing the equivalent coursework offline, but the brand name of those institutions lends significant credibility to any work you do associated with them.
stcredzero 15y ago
Why buy a whole album when I only value a few songs enough to purchase? Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid. So maybe a better analogy for higher education bundling would be with Cable TV? EDIT: If teaching-oriented professors could start offering CaaS (Course as a Service) of one or a few related courses, then the market would no longer be the profs at a particular school, or the profs in all the schools in town, but rather the best profs offering courses on the Internet from the whole online world, then we could see a tremendous increase of access for high quality education. Then the most successful profs could "franchise" the syllabus and teaching methods to other profs. (Syllabus as a service.) In the meantime, others could start aggregating collections of syllabi as "majors," "minors," or other kinds of course sequences.

21 points by iProject 15y ago

I don't think it's a coincidence that the major proponents of doing away with traditional higher education and questioning the value of a college degree are people with at least one degree (in many instances advanced degrees as well) from very prestigious institutions. They believe that in a practical sense, what you really need to know to perform you can gain more efficiently by doing. They ask "Who knows better than somebody with expensive degrees how worthless they are?" I completely disagree with that and I believe the opposite is true. Only people without degrees can speak reliably about whether they regret the decision or not. They actually put themselves on the line. I'm not convinced when I hear people with degrees say that they wish they had known that they didn't need them before or that they would have been just as well without them. That's like somebody who paid for flood insurance claiming "who knows better than I how worthless flood insurance is?" Perhaps the guy down the street who didn't buy it and lost his house. Edit: And to the author's point about iTunes vs buying full albums- that analogy is faulty. There have been community colleges around for many, many years, but the reality is that companies just don't value individual coursework as favorably as an entire degree, particularly one from a prestigious school. The purchaser of a song has very different objectives than a hirer. A song purchaser wants one song and does not want to pay ten times the price to buy an entire album which might have three songs that he likes. Clearly, single purchases are more efficient. But when it comes to hiring, there is no added cost. If I am hiring for a position with a stated salary, I want the most qualified person I can find. If I can hire a guy with three degrees in Computer Science from MIT, I don't really care about the guy with the Microsoft and Cisco certification, even if those are things that are precisely what you need to know on the job. College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. If you pull back and decide you are going to turn down MIT and go learn just the skills you need for your job, there are going to be 5,000 people lined up behind you ready to saddle themselves with debt and work through four years of college to get the degree and you will facing an uphill battle. So in the case of iTunes, a comparable situation is if I had $0.99 to spend on a song, and had hundreds of full albums with that song offered for my $0.99. In that case, I am not going to buy the single song.

wisty 15y ago
> College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to believe that it isn't. People always say this. If it were true, it could be done far cheaper.
- dkrich 15y ago
  It may be true that it could be done for cheaper if the hiring teams bought into a new system. But the course is really set by the hiring team. There was a time when you only had to study legal books on your own and pass a bar exam to become an attorney. Law schools didn't exist until the turn of the century. Nowadays you can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree, and to get a top job, you have to have a degree from a top law school. This is not because the fundamentals being taught at each school are different. Rather law firms know which schools are hard to get into and simply go there to hire their talent because they figure those people are the best. Hopeful attorneys see those firms and want in, so naturally, they want to get into the top law schools. Those who don't, trickle down to the less prestigious schools where the firms that can't afford to compete with the top firms recruit, and so on. This is basically what drives the obsession with higher education in the U.S. whether it is business, law, medicine, or engineering. Now whether a career in a prestigious firm is something you should actually want is a completely different conversation, but allowing that it is something a lot of the most eligible college graduates aspire to, the system will sustain itself.
  - Turing_Machine 15y ago
    "can't seriously pursue a career in law without a law degree" It depends on what you mean by a career. There are still a few states that let you sit for the bar exam without going to law school (California is one, IIRC). That actually makes a certain degree of sense, since it's widely accepted that passing the bar exam is a MUCH more difficult hurdle than completing law school. If you just want a career as a family lawyer, that'd certainly be a low-debt option.
    - WildUtah 15y ago

nickpinkston 15y ago

Anyone else getting an OAUTH error when they try to sign-up with http://degreed.com http://degreed.com (in the article)?

davidblake 15y ago
@Nick thanks for the heads up. It is isolated to users without a live FB session. We are fixing it ASAP.

evoxed 15y ago

> Post the photo to our Facebook Page or Twitter with the caption... Guess I'll just have to wait this one out for now. Hopefully they'll open it up soon.

kijin 15y ago

> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid. That's a problem with the curriculum, not the overall concept of a 4-year degree. There are schools that bundle useless courses as part of the required curriculum just because a tenured prof wants to teach it in a large auditorium. But other schools encourage students to build their own curricula with the courses that offer the most value to them. Brown University, for example, has been doing this for decades. It's not perfect, but it goes a long way toward catering to the needs and desires of each student. I have two (soon to be three) degrees in some combination of humanities and social sciences, and I've thoroughly enjoyed all but one or two of the dozens of courses I've taken so far. I've been fortunate because all the schools I've attended have been quite flexible in their course-taking requirements. I wish most students at many other universities enjoyed the same amount of choices. On the other hand, there is something to be said in favor of requiring engineering students, for example, to take a few courses in the humanities and social sciences. If you think you don't need to know philosophy or history to be a good engineer, you may find yourself at a disadvantage when dealing with today's complicated techno-socio-political issues. I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical and historical context. Sure, you could study history outside of a college. High school really should teach critical thinking skills. But the reality is that most people would never even get a chance to think critically about topics in the humanities and social sciences if they weren't required to do so by their college's curriculum. The same goes for requiring humanities students to take introductory courses in math and science. Honestly, every college student should also be required to take a course in practical computer use unless they can demonstrate that they already know the stuff. EDIT Clarification: There are plenty of other reasons to advocate a reconsideration of the value of higher education as a whole, but a poorly designed curriculum isn't the most important reason. That one can be fixed without ditching the college altogether.

stcredzero 15y ago
I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical and historical context. The parts of the old Soviet Union and China?

_delirium 15y ago

> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? One guess is that a reason employers value degrees is precisely because it indicates a willingness/ability to successfully complete tasks that you might not personally value, but which are required in your institutional role. After all, corporations are institutions that plan to require you to do things if they hire you, some of which you might not value. A somewhat less meta answer is that employers trust standard curricula enough to not be interested in doing case-by-case evaluation of alternatives. So if one person has a "4-year accredited electrical engineering degree", and another person has passed a selection of EE courses they chose themselves, the company will probably prefer the 1st. Evaluating the 2nd candidate requires the company to decide whether that selection of courses constitutes a good EE curriculum (versus, for example, the student having avoided all the hard or math-heavy courses), and most companies don't know or want to know how to evaluate student-customized curricula on a case-by-case basis.

Turing_Machine 15y ago

"Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value?" Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"? That's not to say that higher education doesn't need reform (or quite possibly wholesale replacement). It does, desperately. I just question whether a person who (by definition) doesn't possess a certain piece of knowledge is a good judge of the value of that knowledge. I'm put in mind of my undergrad CS degree -- lots of bitching about how the courses weren't taught in C++ (the "hot" language of the day). Some of the professors even used weird stuff like Lisp! Of course, the professors had been around long enough to see "hot" languages come and go, and were choosing a language thatillustrated the concept under discussion well (which could be Lisp, could be C, could be assembly language, depending on what it was). Of the classmates with whom I'm still in contact, I can't think of many whose primary language for employment is C++.

yummyfajitas 15y ago
Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of knowledge have "value"? Perhaps, but he's certainly a better judge than academics who's continued employment depends on getting him to pay for their services. At least his incentives are properly aligned. When I was in college, my judgement was that the humanities and literature would be useless while advanced math would come in handy. Nothing has happened in the past 10 years to convince me this was incorrect.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Judging by what electives students choose when they have the option, anything with the word "math" anywhere in the vicinity is the first thing most students would skip if they didn't have to take it! If many CS students I've known had their way, all mathematical and theoretical content would be removed from the CS curriculum, and replaced with "real-world" programming classes. Less statistics, discrete math, and computability theory; more node.js, Ruby, and advanced git. Separately from that, on your other comment, I've run into a surprisingly large number of people whose non-technical curricula have had a strong positive impact on their technical jobs. For example, Richard Evans, the AI lead on Black & White, Sims 3, and now a new startup recently acquired by Linden Labs, has a philosophy B.A., and credits it with being core to much of his AI design (his current system is based on a logic modeled on Wittgenstein's view of social interactions).

vectorpush 15y ago

As far as credentials, it seems to me like an "online" degree is worse than no degree at all. There is a horrible stigma regarding the quality of online degrees and doubt regarding the judgement of those who pursue them. This perception can definitely change in the future, but I suspect it won't be for a very long time.

hv23 15y ago
Historically, yes-- due to the likes of University of Phoenix, etc.-- but this is already changing as large, well-respected institutions like Stanford and MIT embrace different methods of online learning. Sure, taking an online course (or series of courses) from Stanford/MIT doesn't have the same perceived value as doing the equivalent coursework offline, but the brand name of those institutions lends significant credibility to any work you do associated with them.

stcredzero 15y ago

Why buy a whole album when I only value a few songs enough to purchase? Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the consumer should be enabled to avoid. So maybe a better analogy for higher education bundling would be with Cable TV? EDIT: If teaching-oriented professors could start offering CaaS (Course as a Service) of one or a few related courses, then the market would no longer be the profs at a particular school, or the profs in all the schools in town, but rather the best profs offering courses on the Internet from the whole online world, then we could see a tremendous increase of access for high quality education. Then the most successful profs could "franchise" the syllabus and teaching methods to other profs. (Syllabus as a service.) In the meantime, others could start aggregating collections of syllabi as "majors," "minors," or other kinds of course sequences.