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I think the problem is fundamentally that two separate concerns are entangled: education, and certification. The certification is what you need. But to get it,

by sago 12y ago

I think the problem is fundamentally that two separate concerns are entangled: education, and certification. The certification is what you need. But to get it, the university can require you to purchase a whole bunch of very expensive education you may not need. Only by separating the two will this problem be solved: having certification authorities that are independent of educational providers. In that utopia, even a regular university can't grant you the certification. They can market themselves as the best and most cost effective way for you to reach the competency needed to achieve your certificate. But, perhaps MOOCs are better, or intensive library study, or perhaps you're already that competent, and don't need any education to get there. It is only that which can solve the scandal of indebting vast swathes of young people by tens of thousands of dollars. So I'm suspicious of this article, because the solutions described still make the same mistakes. The body that provides you with the education, certifies you as having had that education. Okay there may be more evidence as metadata, but still, the incentive is there for providers to bias their certification towards the educational products they want to sell.

wbillingsley 12y ago
In Australia, certification is effectively governed by TEQSA and the relevant accrediting body for your discipline. TEQSA examine whether a university's degree meets the AQF requirements for being a Bachelor's degree (or other kind of degree), and in our case the relevant discipline body is ACS, and they also look in depth at the quality of what we teach. Each of those is a thick, thick, document full of things that go far beyond the exams. It is the education in a degree, not just the exam-answering, that they attempt to accredit. I realise that degree-certification-bodies isn't what you meant by "certification" -- that you're thinking more of the "industry cert" model, where a training centre teaches you material, and then you pay to take an exam from the certifier. The point though is that's not what society (or at least as represented by government) wants university to be. It is, at least currently, supposed to be education not just training and testing.
- sago 12y ago
  The same kind of thing happens in other countries, including the US. There are authorities which accredit universities as providing suitable standards of education to award a degree. That wasn't what I was getting at, no. It prevents diploma-mills, certainly, but does nothing to stop the perverse incentives. And doesn't help any alternative methods of achieving the same competency to compete.
  - wbillingsley 12y ago
    The point is that so far it seems it's not just the "competency certification" that the market and society is demanding -- it (for the moment) really is demanding the education that you describe as a mis-sold extra. That's not so surprising to me, in that a degree tends to be an entry to a career. And that career can be long enough that competencies are likely to change in unpredictable ways over your career. So, it makes some sense for graduate employers to be more interested in an education they believe means you are likely adapt well to those changes, and perhaps lead those changes. Rather than a competency certification that shows you know the current state-of-play. Whether that will change over time is an interesting question. If the market does move towards just certifying competencies, I have an awkward suspicion that it will be because of general trends towards workforce casualisation. If you see employees as disposable (hire the skills of today, and tomorrow fire them to hire the skills of tomorrow) then education is less important than today's competency. This isn't intended as a criticism of MOOCs, nor in any sense to diminish them. I'm not only interested in them, but trying to develop some -- I have something of a vested interest towards MOOCs... It's just that I'm personally more interested in how we can improve MOOCs to offer an education, rather than how we can get the market to stop demanding an education and just want a competency-certification.
    - sago 12y ago
      Aren't you just defining competency in a very narrow way to move the goalposts? If the goal is that students show competency in adapting to changing requirements, and mastering information literacy, then that is the required competency. By competency, I don't mean some narrow technical expertise, but whatever skills it is that an employer needs their workforce to have, that universities claim to impart.
vertex-four 12y ago
Of course... various industries have found that certifications without an education path tie-in are near-pointless. Why? Because nobody can figure out how to do certification exams very well. What a useful certification usually actually says isn't "this person can use this tool", it's "this person has been educated in a certain way and paid attention during that education, leading to the ability to use this tool". For the vast, vast majority of certs out there where you don't have to take a course to take the exam, you can knowledge-cram for a comparatively short period of time, then take the exam without actually having much experience, even if "only" in a lab, then forget most of what you've learned shortly afterwards. As a result, few employers care about them. If you want to do certs separate from education paths, you have to figure out a better way of testing people - possibly real-world (or at least lab-based, scenario-oriented) testing over a period of time.
- sago 12y ago
  Right. I partially agree. Which is why separate certification hasn't succeeded yet. It is, I'd suggest, an area ripe for disruption. Where I disagree is the tacit implication that, therefore university education is somehow better at being an indicator of those skills and qualities. I've seen a lot of terrible graduates who I wouldn't employ if they paid me: graduates who couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag. So I'd respectfully disagree with that implication.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    > Where I disagree is the tacit implication that, therefore university education is somehow better at being an indicator of those skills and qualities. It does tend to be a better indicator - just because it's not perfect doesn't make it the same.
- ninguem2 12y ago
  Actuaries seem to have managed to separate education and certification.
  - giaour 12y ago
jseliger 12y ago
I think the problem is fundamentally that two separate concerns are entangled: education, and certification. There's actually one or two other concerns, too: networking and fun. Some of the value I and many other people got from college is meeting others with similar interests. Regarding fun (and parties), I get the sense that most HN readers probably aren't or weren't party animals, but that's actually a pretty common reason for people to go to college, per Sperber's Beer and Circus (http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Circus-Crippling-Undergraduate-Education/dp/0805068112 http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Circus-Crippling-Undergraduate-Ed...) and Armstrong and Hamilton's Paying for the Party (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliza...). I don't really have a sense of how the university bundle really breaks down into core value.
- sago 12y ago
  Right, but I think the problem is the entangling of the two issues I mentioned.
rguzman 12y ago
I largely agree with this, but there's one complication. A lot of the certification aspect is that certain schools have earned a reputation over many decades for being selective, having high academic standards, and producing effective graduates (no claim as to whether they upkeep those, or even rightfully earned them in the first place). It is very difficult to invent some certification that is comparably valuable to a degree from such schools.
- analog31 12y ago
  Perhaps a broader issue is that the current system is the one that nobody designed. And, designing a certification system from scratch, that achieves any kind of widespread acceptance, may be impossible. I see something similar happen on a smaller scale when a business tries to re-design a successful legacy product: The conditions that made it possible to design the original product no longer exist. Nobody really understands why the legacy product was successful, and the original designers are long gone -- they were "acqui-fired." The legacy product might have a number of glaring shortcomings, but the re-design team ends up creating something that's worse.
rayiner 12y ago
You're forgetting the other important one: sorting. Why do banks, consulting firms, and even tech companies go gaga over Stanford and Harvard grads? Because the UCLA grad doesn't have the requisite skills? No, because they trust them to sort the top 1% from the top 5% from the top 20%. Neither MOOCs nor certification programs offer that key function. When Coursera only accepts people with a certain SAT score, then issues "degrees" ranking candidates by class performance, I think we'll see employers take them more seriously.
- sago 12y ago
  Right. The article talks about this. 'Top' universities are filters for high degrees of talent or money. It is not their value-add then, which makes their graduates employable, it is their pickiness choosing with students to allow to buy their services. But I partially agree: certification programs need to indicate degree of attainment, not just pass or fail. I disagree that SAT entry requirements is particularly important to an employer. If I wanted to make sure a candidate had a certain SAT score, I could ask them for it, couldn't I?
- pjbrunet 12y ago
  Interesting point. Though universities allow F students in through loopholes. Fail HS, go to community college where the tests are open book, then transfer to a University which by law must accept them.
- foobarqux 12y ago
  I think that filtering is only one of many important factors, many of which are interrelated. An elite school's imprimatur, for example, can more easily convince clients and even internal management of an employee's competence. Filtering alone doesn't explain why those companies go 50% deep into the pool of Harvard graduates before considering the top 5% of UCLA grads.
Apofis 12y ago
It would be nice to able to get, say a: * General Computer Science Cert * Software Architecture Cert * C Lang Cert or a Java Cert from an accredited institution and be instantly employable at the entry level. This is kind of how it works with Network Engineering, I wonder why it can't with Programming/SoftDev.
nitwit005 12y ago
Business owners would love if there were some exam which accurately informed them about who to hire, and there has been no shortage of attempts to create such a thing. The problem is, most of the characteristics needed seem to be things we don't understand, or don't know how to quantify. Greatly complicating things is the fact that you often don't need to know anything in particular to succeed. There is no shortage of people who learned on the job and became successful. Filtering out such people with an exam may badly damage your hiring.

by sago 12y ago

wbillingsley 12y ago

In Australia, certification is effectively governed by TEQSA and the relevant accrediting body for your discipline. TEQSA examine whether a university's degree meets the AQF requirements for being a Bachelor's degree (or other kind of degree), and in our case the relevant discipline body is ACS, and they also look in depth at the quality of what we teach. Each of those is a thick, thick, document full of things that go far beyond the exams. It is the education in a degree, not just the exam-answering, that they attempt to accredit. I realise that degree-certification-bodies isn't what you meant by "certification" -- that you're thinking more of the "industry cert" model, where a training centre teaches you material, and then you pay to take an exam from the certifier. The point though is that's not what society (or at least as represented by government) wants university to be. It is, at least currently, supposed to be education not just training and testing.

sago 12y ago
The same kind of thing happens in other countries, including the US. There are authorities which accredit universities as providing suitable standards of education to award a degree. That wasn't what I was getting at, no. It prevents diploma-mills, certainly, but does nothing to stop the perverse incentives. And doesn't help any alternative methods of achieving the same competency to compete.
- wbillingsley 12y ago
  The point is that so far it seems it's not just the "competency certification" that the market and society is demanding -- it (for the moment) really is demanding the education that you describe as a mis-sold extra. That's not so surprising to me, in that a degree tends to be an entry to a career. And that career can be long enough that competencies are likely to change in unpredictable ways over your career. So, it makes some sense for graduate employers to be more interested in an education they believe means you are likely adapt well to those changes, and perhaps lead those changes. Rather than a competency certification that shows you know the current state-of-play. Whether that will change over time is an interesting question. If the market does move towards just certifying competencies, I have an awkward suspicion that it will be because of general trends towards workforce casualisation. If you see employees as disposable (hire the skills of today, and tomorrow fire them to hire the skills of tomorrow) then education is less important than today's competency. This isn't intended as a criticism of MOOCs, nor in any sense to diminish them. I'm not only interested in them, but trying to develop some -- I have something of a vested interest towards MOOCs... It's just that I'm personally more interested in how we can improve MOOCs to offer an education, rather than how we can get the market to stop demanding an education and just want a competency-certification.
  - sago 12y ago
    Aren't you just defining competency in a very narrow way to move the goalposts? If the goal is that students show competency in adapting to changing requirements, and mastering information literacy, then that is the required competency. By competency, I don't mean some narrow technical expertise, but whatever skills it is that an employer needs their workforce to have, that universities claim to impart.

vertex-four 12y ago

Of course... various industries have found that certifications without an education path tie-in are near-pointless. Why? Because nobody can figure out how to do certification exams very well. What a useful certification usually actually says isn't "this person can use this tool", it's "this person has been educated in a certain way and paid attention during that education, leading to the ability to use this tool". For the vast, vast majority of certs out there where you don't have to take a course to take the exam, you can knowledge-cram for a comparatively short period of time, then take the exam without actually having much experience, even if "only" in a lab, then forget most of what you've learned shortly afterwards. As a result, few employers care about them. If you want to do certs separate from education paths, you have to figure out a better way of testing people - possibly real-world (or at least lab-based, scenario-oriented) testing over a period of time.

sago 12y ago
Right. I partially agree. Which is why separate certification hasn't succeeded yet. It is, I'd suggest, an area ripe for disruption. Where I disagree is the tacit implication that, therefore university education is somehow better at being an indicator of those skills and qualities. I've seen a lot of terrible graduates who I wouldn't employ if they paid me: graduates who couldn't reason their way out of a paper bag. So I'd respectfully disagree with that implication.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  > Where I disagree is the tacit implication that, therefore university education is somehow better at being an indicator of those skills and qualities. It does tend to be a better indicator - just because it's not perfect doesn't make it the same.
ninguem2 12y ago
Actuaries seem to have managed to separate education and certification.
- giaour 12y ago

jseliger 12y ago

I think the problem is fundamentally that two separate concerns are entangled: education, and certification. There's actually one or two other concerns, too: networking and fun. Some of the value I and many other people got from college is meeting others with similar interests. Regarding fun (and parties), I get the sense that most HN readers probably aren't or weren't party animals, but that's actually a pretty common reason for people to go to college, per Sperber's Beer and Circus (http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Circus-Crippling-Undergraduate-Education/dp/0805068112 http://www.amazon.com/Beer-Circus-Crippling-Undergraduate-Ed...) and Armstrong and Hamilton's Paying for the Party (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-elizabeth-armstrong-and-laura-hamilton/ http://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliza...). I don't really have a sense of how the university bundle really breaks down into core value.

sago 12y ago
Right, but I think the problem is the entangling of the two issues I mentioned.

rguzman 12y ago

I largely agree with this, but there's one complication. A lot of the certification aspect is that certain schools have earned a reputation over many decades for being selective, having high academic standards, and producing effective graduates (no claim as to whether they upkeep those, or even rightfully earned them in the first place). It is very difficult to invent some certification that is comparably valuable to a degree from such schools.

analog31 12y ago
Perhaps a broader issue is that the current system is the one that nobody designed. And, designing a certification system from scratch, that achieves any kind of widespread acceptance, may be impossible. I see something similar happen on a smaller scale when a business tries to re-design a successful legacy product: The conditions that made it possible to design the original product no longer exist. Nobody really understands why the legacy product was successful, and the original designers are long gone -- they were "acqui-fired." The legacy product might have a number of glaring shortcomings, but the re-design team ends up creating something that's worse.

rayiner 12y ago

You're forgetting the other important one: sorting. Why do banks, consulting firms, and even tech companies go gaga over Stanford and Harvard grads? Because the UCLA grad doesn't have the requisite skills? No, because they trust them to sort the top 1% from the top 5% from the top 20%. Neither MOOCs nor certification programs offer that key function. When Coursera only accepts people with a certain SAT score, then issues "degrees" ranking candidates by class performance, I think we'll see employers take them more seriously.

sago 12y ago
Right. The article talks about this. 'Top' universities are filters for high degrees of talent or money. It is not their value-add then, which makes their graduates employable, it is their pickiness choosing with students to allow to buy their services. But I partially agree: certification programs need to indicate degree of attainment, not just pass or fail. I disagree that SAT entry requirements is particularly important to an employer. If I wanted to make sure a candidate had a certain SAT score, I could ask them for it, couldn't I?
pjbrunet 12y ago
Interesting point. Though universities allow F students in through loopholes. Fail HS, go to community college where the tests are open book, then transfer to a University which by law must accept them.
foobarqux 12y ago
I think that filtering is only one of many important factors, many of which are interrelated. An elite school's imprimatur, for example, can more easily convince clients and even internal management of an employee's competence. Filtering alone doesn't explain why those companies go 50% deep into the pool of Harvard graduates before considering the top 5% of UCLA grads.

Apofis 12y ago

It would be nice to able to get, say a: * General Computer Science Cert * Software Architecture Cert * C Lang Cert or a Java Cert from an accredited institution and be instantly employable at the entry level. This is kind of how it works with Network Engineering, I wonder why it can't with Programming/SoftDev.

nitwit005 12y ago

Business owners would love if there were some exam which accurately informed them about who to hire, and there has been no shortage of attempts to create such a thing. The problem is, most of the characteristics needed seem to be things we don't understand, or don't know how to quantify. Greatly complicating things is the fact that you often don't need to know anything in particular to succeed. There is no shortage of people who learned on the job and became successful. Filtering out such people with an exam may badly damage your hiring.