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> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fal

> Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree. Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it!

rahkiin 1y ago
Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors. So to do it directly you need to do it all at once?
- morleytj 1y ago
  In the US a doctorate usually doesn't require a master's, most people go straight from undergrad to phd.
  - sdenton4 1y ago
    To add slightly more detail: Most research math programs in the US are 5(ish) year 'combined' masters+phd programs. The first couple years are basically course work, seminars, finding your area and advisor, and then the rest is the actual research work. It's not uncommon to leave after the first couple years with a Master's degree.
- barry-cotter 1y ago
  I have a Master’s and never got a Bachelor’s. Universities can admit people more or less as they please, subject only to the very forgiving scrutiny of accreditation agencies or whatever government department officially supervises them.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors. Many Master’s programs require Bachelor’s as a prerequisite for admission, and some of the others include a Bachelor’s at some point, but not all do. (The same is true of the Ph.D. and the stereotypically preceding degrees, and also of some professional degrees and Bachelor’s degrees.)
general1726 1y ago
Hey, you are not getting your degree without paying for it.
pinewurst 1y ago
The interesting part is that two others admitted her but retracted after "higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions". Was she not considered properly conditioned?
- MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
  "I'm in charge, I enforce the rules, I'm a big deal."
- terminalshort 1y ago
  Of course she was, but that's not what this is about. Letting her in proves that the bureaucratic credentials offered by schools are meaningless. The university system in its present form in the US is entirely predicated on the fiction that those credentials actually mean something and are worth paying six figures for.
whatshisface 1y ago
Two out of ten is pretty good for anything involving individual decisions, just ask any salesperson.
skeptrune 1y ago
I think the biggest flaw with higher education today is that we're pushing people into doing undergraduate degrees who are already well beyond coming out of self learning from high school or other experiences.
- jonhohle 1y ago
  That’s one of the biggest problems? Not pushing people into higher educational programs with little societal or economic value but huge loads of debt?
  - skeptrune 1y ago
    I think research and higher education does have value for the most part. It's undergrad that's really worthless and something people only do for the experience.
    - xp84 1y ago
      Indeed. I've long felt that most undergrad students would be better served by a typical college minus the formal classes. Basically dorms and all the other amenities found in a typical college campus, where you mainly gain life skills and mingle with other people your age. Because most people I met at an average 4-year school were there because it's a societal expectation among certain classes, it's less scary than just getting a job and figuring out life completely on your own, and it is 10x-100x easier to make friends at college than just "out in the world." Not on the list: to learn from college classes, which at an average school teach you less than you'd get from a $200 a year subscription to Great Courses Plus or Brilliant. Or free from Khan Academy. I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.
    - psyklic 1y ago
      Undergrads who care about learning and research will take the most challenging classes, do research with professors, and surround themselves with other strong students who will push them. Even at top universities, very very few freshmen are capable of doing high-quality research immediately. They'd be better served learning the foundations inside and out with a cohort of similarly strong students to challenge them.
TheRealPomax 1y ago
Conversely: if that's all it takes, there is no point in going to University just to get a piece of paper that says "you did the thing you already did". University (for folks serious about continuing in academia after) is (obviously) about making sure you have the same base knowledge as everyone else, but also for you to come to terms with how academia actually works, who the bad players are, who the good players are, and who you need to know to get shit to happen for you. So in that sense, most Universities going "no" is literally the most accurate reflection of what life's going to be like on a continuous basis on the inside.
jackero 1y ago
50% of my college education was general education though. And frankly I find it just as valuable.
assword 1y ago
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to. Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”. AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- ninala 1y ago
  Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.
  - willhslade 1y ago
    Object orientation applied to life.
TrackerFF 1y ago
I see your point, but undergraduate degrees should provide a wide foundation, with little specialization. As you progress to a masters degree, you become more specialized. A doctorate is as specialized as it gets. It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. Even to such a degree that they can write a doctorate on it. But I don't think that's a good excuse to make them forego other curriculum, especially if it is required for other students to take. Schools have a responsibility to educate people to a certain standard, and give them some general breadth.
- dvrj101 1y ago
  > It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. sounds like Phd
- thrawa8387336 1y ago
  No, that was the purpose of high school. As not practiced in public schools, as not practiced in the US
  - 998244353 1y ago
    No, it's both. The purpose of high school is to give you a wide foundation on everything. The purpose of an undergraduate degree (in math) is to give you a wide foundation (in math). In a (math) PhD, you are generally hyper-specialized in a very, very narrow area (of math).
    - griffzhowl 1y ago
      Although the end goal of a PhD is a specialized thesis, the first couple of years generally involves courses with a wide coverage of analysis and algebra at the graduate level. Given her achievements, I'd be very surprised if Cairo hasn't already covered the material in an undergrad degree
  - MangoToupe 1y ago
    This is the entire premise of a liberal arts education. Not everyone pursues one, but it's certainly well-represented at the tertiary education level.
JAlexoid 1y ago
This is ignoring the value of the whole education process, that you go through the years at a university. I disagree that she should skip the general education.
- xp84 1y ago
  Thinking about my GE requirements at undergrad, I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. She has but one lifetime, and can contribute much to her field. The subjects such as English composition, she should be allowed to test out of if she is already a good writer.
  - com2kid 1y ago
    > I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. This is a common STEM view, but it is inherently wrong. IMHO it dates back to the unfortunate divide between science and the liberal arts, whereas both were once considered a single field, now days there is disdain and mistrust between the two sides. The point of history classes isn't to memorize the dates of wars, is it to understand the motivations of humans, it is to understand how the world we lived in has been shaped throughout time, and it is to learn how to do, and understand, research about the history of a place. The point of English classes isn't just to get good at writing, it is to get good at various types of writing, it is to learn how to read different forms of literature, and it is to have a guided tour through a chosen selection of literature to hopefully develop one's character and thoughtfulness. One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music. We started off around 500ad or so and went forward through time up until about 1920. We learned the vocabulary of music, how to sit down and listen to a piece of music and describe what we were hearing. After I was done with the class I went from appreciating a handfuls of genres of music to appreciating music itself no matter the genre. It was a 3 credit guaranteed A class that had enriched my life by an enormous amount. If you really love your major, then the point of going to university was NOT your major, odds are you would've studied that field with or without the school. (Barring fields that require large capital investments, chemistry, physics, playing with an entire orchestra, building airplanes, etc) The point is everything else.
thechao 1y ago
In my teens I worked with the statistics department at UTMB. That had a cast of characters there; many profs in the 70s and 80s, who'd gotten their degrees before WW2. A number of them had schooling of the form: Start school at 9-10, do 5 years of public school, got to a 1 year prep, do a year or two of college, do a two year PhD. Most of them had their PhD's by 22.
nurettin 1y ago
> what a damning indictment of today's Universities. Prodigy skips undergrad -> Universities are doomed? What?
JohnKemeny 1y ago
> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it! The purpose of a PhD is not writing a dissertation. It is a research school, and I'm sure she could still learn a thing or two about research (and teaching).
Quekid5 1y ago
That's a nice quip, but aren't degrees meant to offer breadth of knowledge? (I'm sure she has lots, but perhaps is weak in other areas.)
Aurornis 1y ago
> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. > She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it. I’m not suggesting this person is doing anything fraudulent as she seems quite impressive. However, educational institutions get constant requests from parents who want their children to skip far ahead before they’re ready. It’s a competitive world and they know that being able to claim a child skipped several grades or even skipped undergrad entirely is a unique and very impressive achievement for the resume. It also theoretically provides a few additional years of earning potential by giving a career head start. The first problem is that many of these parents (again, no accusations for this specific case) see this and want to make it happen for their child at any cost. There are some wild stories about parents trying to cheat their kids forward or falsifying their accomplishments to try to skip grades. The secondary problem is that it can be hard on kids to be thrust forward so far past their peers. I had several friends who skipped a grade in middle school and most of them didn’t have a great experience for social reasons. Skipping undergrad altogether would thrust someone into a foreign world with a lot of baseline expectations and norms that they hadn’t yet learned, combined with no peers their age to discuss it with. It creates a high chance for burnout or failure, which could leave them worse off than when they started. That’s why the recommendation is generally to do undergrad at a challenging institution that allows students some upward mobility in specific areas where they’re ahead. No reasonable undergrad program is going to have this person taking Algebra 101, but there are a lot of opportunities for them to jump right into advanced programs and go deep and broad.
- fn-mote 1y ago
  Clearly the correct method is: publish your “dissertation” first, then apply for admittance to the PhD program.
- throwaway81523 1y ago
  IIRC Erik Demaine was also homeschooled, skipped college, got a very early PhD, and joined the MIT math faculty as a teenager (he is a full professor there now). Johnny von Neumann OTOH went through a "normal" secondary education partly because his parents wanted him to have traditional social exposure to kids his age while he was growing up. His math training was very accelerated though, and he had professional level research publications at 17.
paulpauper 1y ago
I don't see why it would matter. she could quit math now and still be ahead of the majority of mathematician in terms of contributions. The rest is just formalities. I can see her breezing through the undergrad, quals, etc . It would just be a small delay.
throwaway81523 1y ago
There is a story about when Stephen Wolfram applied for a job at AT&T. The HR person asked him where had gone to college. Wolfram confessed that he had never gone to college. Well ok, did you graduate high school? Um no, I'm afraid not. GED? Nope. What about primary school? Wolfram looks more and more more embarrassed, and admits that he didn't even finish primary school. HR person by now is quite uncomfortable when Wolfram manages to think of something. He says "I do happen to have a Ph.D. Does that help?"

rahkiin 1y ago

Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors. So to do it directly you need to do it all at once?

morleytj 1y ago
In the US a doctorate usually doesn't require a master's, most people go straight from undergrad to phd.
- sdenton4 1y ago
  To add slightly more detail: Most research math programs in the US are 5(ish) year 'combined' masters+phd programs. The first couple years are basically course work, seminars, finding your area and advisor, and then the rest is the actual research work. It's not uncommon to leave after the first couple years with a Master's degree.
barry-cotter 1y ago
I have a Master’s and never got a Bachelor’s. Universities can admit people more or less as they please, subject only to the very forgiving scrutiny of accreditation agencies or whatever government department officially supervises them.
dragonwriter 1y ago
> Normally you have a master of science as well. And for that you require a bachelors. Many Master’s programs require Bachelor’s as a prerequisite for admission, and some of the others include a Bachelor’s at some point, but not all do. (The same is true of the Ph.D. and the stereotypically preceding degrees, and also of some professional degrees and Bachelor’s degrees.)

general1726 1y ago

Hey, you are not getting your degree without paying for it.

pinewurst 1y ago

The interesting part is that two others admitted her but retracted after "higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions". Was she not considered properly conditioned?

MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
"I'm in charge, I enforce the rules, I'm a big deal."
terminalshort 1y ago
Of course she was, but that's not what this is about. Letting her in proves that the bureaucratic credentials offered by schools are meaningless. The university system in its present form in the US is entirely predicated on the fiction that those credentials actually mean something and are worth paying six figures for.

whatshisface 1y ago

Two out of ten is pretty good for anything involving individual decisions, just ask any salesperson.

skeptrune 1y ago

I think the biggest flaw with higher education today is that we're pushing people into doing undergraduate degrees who are already well beyond coming out of self learning from high school or other experiences.

jonhohle 1y ago
That’s one of the biggest problems? Not pushing people into higher educational programs with little societal or economic value but huge loads of debt?
- skeptrune 1y ago
  I think research and higher education does have value for the most part. It's undergrad that's really worthless and something people only do for the experience.
  - xp84 1y ago
    Indeed. I've long felt that most undergrad students would be better served by a typical college minus the formal classes. Basically dorms and all the other amenities found in a typical college campus, where you mainly gain life skills and mingle with other people your age. Because most people I met at an average 4-year school were there because it's a societal expectation among certain classes, it's less scary than just getting a job and figuring out life completely on your own, and it is 10x-100x easier to make friends at college than just "out in the world." Not on the list: to learn from college classes, which at an average school teach you less than you'd get from a $200 a year subscription to Great Courses Plus or Brilliant. Or free from Khan Academy. I know a few very special schools give undergrads access to brilliant minds in their field, but I also have been told that undergrads at those schools are mostly taught by grad students, so I'm not sure that Ivies provide a lot either, beyond the opportunity to hobnob with the legacies that will be running Goldman Sachs in 20 years.
  - psyklic 1y ago
    Undergrads who care about learning and research will take the most challenging classes, do research with professors, and surround themselves with other strong students who will push them. Even at top universities, very very few freshmen are capable of doing high-quality research immediately. They'd be better served learning the foundations inside and out with a cohort of similarly strong students to challenge them.

TheRealPomax 1y ago

Conversely: if that's all it takes, there is no point in going to University just to get a piece of paper that says "you did the thing you already did". University (for folks serious about continuing in academia after) is (obviously) about making sure you have the same base knowledge as everyone else, but also for you to come to terms with how academia actually works, who the bad players are, who the good players are, and who you need to know to get shit to happen for you. So in that sense, most Universities going "no" is literally the most accurate reflection of what life's going to be like on a continuous basis on the inside.

jackero 1y ago

50% of my college education was general education though. And frankly I find it just as valuable.

assword 1y ago

> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. There’s a modern phenomenon I’ve been thinking about but have struggled to put a name to. Everything just becomes so generalized, streamlined that it becomes impossible to operate outside of the pre defined “happy path”. AI will make this increase 100x as taking humans out of the loop seems to accelerate this process.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
ninala 1y ago
Perhaps the term "canalization" fits? Coined by C.H. Waddington, describing the process of forming a chreode in a homeorhetic system. But it doesn't really encompass the "everything becomes overly generalized" concept you mentioned. Rather, it's more about robustness against perturbation of a trajectory in a conceptual space. Christopher Alexander called them 'paths in configuration space'.
- willhslade 1y ago
  Object orientation applied to life.

TrackerFF 1y ago

I see your point, but undergraduate degrees should provide a wide foundation, with little specialization. As you progress to a masters degree, you become more specialized. A doctorate is as specialized as it gets. It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. Even to such a degree that they can write a doctorate on it. But I don't think that's a good excuse to make them forego other curriculum, especially if it is required for other students to take. Schools have a responsibility to educate people to a certain standard, and give them some general breadth.

dvrj101 1y ago
> It is entirely possible for people to intensely focus on a very, very narrow thing - and ignore everything else. sounds like Phd
thrawa8387336 1y ago
No, that was the purpose of high school. As not practiced in public schools, as not practiced in the US
- 998244353 1y ago
  No, it's both. The purpose of high school is to give you a wide foundation on everything. The purpose of an undergraduate degree (in math) is to give you a wide foundation (in math). In a (math) PhD, you are generally hyper-specialized in a very, very narrow area (of math).
  - griffzhowl 1y ago
    Although the end goal of a PhD is a specialized thesis, the first couple of years generally involves courses with a wide coverage of analysis and algebra at the graduate level. Given her achievements, I'd be very surprised if Cairo hasn't already covered the material in an undergrad degree
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  This is the entire premise of a liberal arts education. Not everyone pursues one, but it's certainly well-represented at the tertiary education level.

JAlexoid 1y ago

This is ignoring the value of the whole education process, that you go through the years at a university. I disagree that she should skip the general education.

xp84 1y ago
Thinking about my GE requirements at undergrad, I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. She has but one lifetime, and can contribute much to her field. The subjects such as English composition, she should be allowed to test out of if she is already a good writer.
- com2kid 1y ago
  > I think it would be a waste of this girl's time to be forced to learn about and write about random subjects that don't interest her. This is a common STEM view, but it is inherently wrong. IMHO it dates back to the unfortunate divide between science and the liberal arts, whereas both were once considered a single field, now days there is disdain and mistrust between the two sides. The point of history classes isn't to memorize the dates of wars, is it to understand the motivations of humans, it is to understand how the world we lived in has been shaped throughout time, and it is to learn how to do, and understand, research about the history of a place. The point of English classes isn't just to get good at writing, it is to get good at various types of writing, it is to learn how to read different forms of literature, and it is to have a guided tour through a chosen selection of literature to hopefully develop one's character and thoughtfulness. One of the most valuable classes I ever took at University was the Art Of Listening To Music. We started off around 500ad or so and went forward through time up until about 1920. We learned the vocabulary of music, how to sit down and listen to a piece of music and describe what we were hearing. After I was done with the class I went from appreciating a handfuls of genres of music to appreciating music itself no matter the genre. It was a 3 credit guaranteed A class that had enriched my life by an enormous amount. If you really love your major, then the point of going to university was NOT your major, odds are you would've studied that field with or without the school. (Barring fields that require large capital investments, chemistry, physics, playing with an entire orchestra, building airplanes, etc) The point is everything else.

thechao 1y ago

In my teens I worked with the statistics department at UTMB. That had a cast of characters there; many profs in the 70s and 80s, who'd gotten their degrees before WW2. A number of them had schooling of the form: Start school at 9-10, do 5 years of public school, got to a 1 year prep, do a year or two of college, do a two year PhD. Most of them had their PhD's by 22.

nurettin 1y ago

> what a damning indictment of today's Universities. Prodigy skips undergrad -> Universities are doomed? What?

JohnKemeny 1y ago

> She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it! The purpose of a PhD is not writing a dissertation. It is a research school, and I'm sure she could still learn a thing or two about research (and teaching).

Quekid5 1y ago

That's a nice quip, but aren't degrees meant to offer breadth of knowledge? (I'm sure she has lots, but perhaps is weak in other areas.)

Aurornis 1y ago

> Jeez... what a damning indictment of today's Universities. > She could just use her publication as a dissertation and be done with it. I’m not suggesting this person is doing anything fraudulent as she seems quite impressive. However, educational institutions get constant requests from parents who want their children to skip far ahead before they’re ready. It’s a competitive world and they know that being able to claim a child skipped several grades or even skipped undergrad entirely is a unique and very impressive achievement for the resume. It also theoretically provides a few additional years of earning potential by giving a career head start. The first problem is that many of these parents (again, no accusations for this specific case) see this and want to make it happen for their child at any cost. There are some wild stories about parents trying to cheat their kids forward or falsifying their accomplishments to try to skip grades. The secondary problem is that it can be hard on kids to be thrust forward so far past their peers. I had several friends who skipped a grade in middle school and most of them didn’t have a great experience for social reasons. Skipping undergrad altogether would thrust someone into a foreign world with a lot of baseline expectations and norms that they hadn’t yet learned, combined with no peers their age to discuss it with. It creates a high chance for burnout or failure, which could leave them worse off than when they started. That’s why the recommendation is generally to do undergrad at a challenging institution that allows students some upward mobility in specific areas where they’re ahead. No reasonable undergrad program is going to have this person taking Algebra 101, but there are a lot of opportunities for them to jump right into advanced programs and go deep and broad.

fn-mote 1y ago
Clearly the correct method is: publish your “dissertation” first, then apply for admittance to the PhD program.
throwaway81523 1y ago
IIRC Erik Demaine was also homeschooled, skipped college, got a very early PhD, and joined the MIT math faculty as a teenager (he is a full professor there now). Johnny von Neumann OTOH went through a "normal" secondary education partly because his parents wanted him to have traditional social exposure to kids his age while he was growing up. His math training was very accelerated though, and he had professional level research publications at 17.

paulpauper 1y ago

I don't see why it would matter. she could quit math now and still be ahead of the majority of mathematician in terms of contributions. The rest is just formalities. I can see her breezing through the undergrad, quals, etc . It would just be a small delay.

throwaway81523 1y ago

There is a story about when Stephen Wolfram applied for a job at AT&T. The HR person asked him where had gone to college. Wolfram confessed that he had never gone to college. Well ok, did you graduate high school? Um no, I'm afraid not. GED? Nope. What about primary school? Wolfram looks more and more more embarrassed, and admits that he didn't even finish primary school. HR person by now is quite uncomfortable when Wolfram manages to think of something. He says "I do happen to have a Ph.D. Does that help?"