10 ms·

Against Tulip Subsidies

83 points by evanpw 11y ago

fredkbloggs 11y ago
The author was doing great right up until the last paragraph. His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. Then there is also the large grey area in between, in which a university education in certain fields might be useful but not essential. What he would do is abolish the right of those professions in which such an education is essential from applying the same standard he lauds earlier: that physicians must attend medical school. For engineers, a university education with a specialty in engineering is exactly what medical school is to physicians. Many people here believe that a university education is not required to be a computer programmer, and I agree. But programmer is a vocation, like plumber or firefighter; it requires specialized skills and experience to do well but does not require a university education. If you spent 3 months learning one language and one or two common frameworks for making e-commerce sites, you are reasonably qualified to work on e-commerce sites for companies that use that language and framework. However, being a programmer and being an engineer are not the same; an engineer has been educated both more broadly and more deeply, and should be capable of solving larger and more difficult problems, designing whole systems, and in general should have the education and experience to understand new problems more thoroughly. It's the difference between the architect who designs a building (or one of its systems) and the construction crew who erects it. Both are essential, but they have (properly) different qualifications. There are many other fields where some sort of education is required. I agree that many of those fields conveniently piggyback on university education (usually with a particular field of study requirement) when other similar mechanisms might do as well. But the notion that such an education is universally irrelevant is absurd. If the author wants people without university education to be paid as much as people with it, the solution is not legislation. Instead, he should hire them.
- mrestko 11y ago
  I also think that there is no practical way his solution could work, at least not with the laws the way they are. How would you ask people to explain gaps in their work history? Are you no longer allowed to consider why someone was unemployed for 4 or 5 consecutive years? Additionally, I don't think you can easily do general intelligence testing for a job. You have to be able to show that every question relates to job performance and that it does not cause a disproportionate impact on the hiring of people from protected classes.
- randomdata 11y ago
  His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    > If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think? It is trivially easy to think up questions that any Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour. The question is how to ask questions that matter for a particular job. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this.
    - greenyoda 11y ago
      "If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this." But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?
andrewvc 11y ago
People have a hard time separating the value of an entrenched institution from whether it's a good value. More school is often good, but that doesn't make it a good deal. Every time the discussion of cs degrees comes up here it's followed by an avalanche of people saying how college gave them this and that and then a story about the one idiot they used to work with who didn't go to college. I went to two years of community college and have never had student loan debt. I've worked on harder problems than many cs grads have. I've gone farther and actually retained more knowledge. I got a great deal taking the path I've followed.
grendelt 11y ago
Yeah, no thanks. I prefer doctors and lawyers that have gone to school rather than watching MOOC videos on a bus.
- white-flame 11y ago
  You missed the point. Doctors in the US take 4 years of generally medically-unrelated undergraduate schooling before they're allowed into medical school. Why not just allow them into medical school?
  - BashiBazouk 11y ago
    Actually the author forgets to mention that you can have any major to get in to medical school but many medical schools still require quite a few core courses you are expected to complete while in undergrad including two years of Chemistry, a year of math, physics and writing.
- mrestko 11y ago
  In the article, he explicitly compares American doctors with Irish doctors. They both go to school, but the Americans go for about three additional years. There is apparently no real difference in medical outcomes.
white-flame 11y ago
I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons. Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling everybody through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end. Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.
- mrestko 11y ago
  He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".
  - pjscott 11y ago
    His argument on this point is short enough that it's worth just quoting entire: > (Yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)
    - rnprince 11y ago
      Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors... Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.
salmonet 11y ago
I seldom refer to knowledge I gained from university classes. It was an important signaling device and a great time socially, but it was not an efficient use of my time as far as preparing to be successful in my career. I would be surprised if there isn't a good alternative to higher education for bright kids 10 years from now, but I don't think it will have anything to do with legislation.
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  I still get a lot out of the systems approach to engineering from my university classes. Still, this is something that could be taught in weeks instead of years.
- rhino369 11y ago
  The knowledge you gain is only part of it. You also learn how to learn by thinking critically. So yea, that course on how to fabricate a diode using 1990's technology, wasn't useful, but when I had to learn how to manufacture NAND flash using current technology learning it wasn't nearly as hard.
BashiBazouk 11y ago
So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?
- logician76 11y ago
  Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..
  - throwaway342526 11y ago
    It's not wrong. Making something free means paying for it in a transparent fashion. Bernie Sanders is not talking about changing the institutional structure of college such that it somehow has no cost to provide. He is talking about the government paying that cost on behalf of students. I agree with free education, by the way. We currently spend our budgets on much less useful things. But let's be honest about what it means and how it works.
    - logician76 11y ago
      Yes it is wrong, paying the cost of education at cost (for a government), or paying students to pay market prices (inflated by perception of value) is a huge difference. Which do you think Bernie Sanders was implying?
      - throwaway342526 11y ago
        Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.
        logician76 11y ago
        In real life there are more possibilities in between 0 and 1.. Also look at how its done in other countries. Apparently americans can go to Germany to study for free in a recent article. Absurd indeed.
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- deleted 11y ago
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Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down. However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hope of getting out. Scott has a post on these awful equilbriua called Meditations on Moloch that's pretty depressing:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ I can see one way of maybe getting out of this. If one nice country was to implement this examination-based approach and then offer citizinship to those who score very well on a "general degree examination" (basically an intelligence test) they might be able to setup a brain-drain dynamic that would maybe push us out of this awfulness. Said country could even subsidise the very brightest with the equivalent of a signing bonus. Even a permanent no-strings-attached basic income for the brightest of the bright would be very cheap as they're so rare, and may be worth it for the positive externalities as they're the type of people who build new industries. "We'll pay you to live, work, learn, and be credentialed here" may be enough to dull the luster of the ivies.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures). A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of actual working code in it is much better than an hour of writing pseudocode on a whiteboard.
  - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
    Of course they are a proxy, but they are much better and cheaper proxies. I was assuming that credentialism would remain - examination-based degrees make credentialism much less costly.
morgante 11y ago
> App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking. No they don't. I have never once considered a recent bootcamp graduate to be equivalently talented and knowledgeable as a recent CS graduate. Their earnings difference certainly reflects this. (Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad.)
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  >Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.
    - ThrustVectoring 11y ago
      "Less probable" is still competing for the same jobs. Perhaps not as well, but competing nonetheless.
      - nmrm2 11y ago
        I call this the Einstein fallacy. It says that quality Q is of questionable relevance/utility/value because there exist people without quality Q that do X, even though the vast majority of people who do X have quality Q. But that argument is kind of insane. If you want a job at Google, you're much better off getting a degree from a good university. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional. (EDIT: And no, App Academy graduates do not -- on balance -- compete for the same jobs as recent Stanford graduates. On balance, they compete for very different jobs and have far lower starting salaries. The existence of exceptional outliers is not a good basis for policy or decision making.) (edit2: whoever just downvoted every single post I made on this article: the reply button is there for a reason :-) Otherwise, the early career salary for Stanford is $97,100. Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?)
Futurebot 11y ago
We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm... Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer it be universities themselves) give you a full ride (not just tuition, but books, room and board, transport, food, etc.) and you'd pay them out of your gross income after you graduate. The big difference is that just about anyone who is willing to give up the percentage could get it. Sticker shock and rising bills do not come into play. Right now, you're at the mercy of the financial aid system and all its fickleness (relatives make too much/too little, you have too many/too few assets, you are in a high CoL area and loans don't cover anywhere near what you need, the amount they're willing to give you shifts with the political winds, etc.) The advantages of this system are that you would never have to worry about your relatives being able to fund you; you wouldn't need to work while going to school; you would not need to reapply each year and hope you get enough; and there's no issues with bankruptcy or anything else (the obligation would be non-dischargeable, just like now, but since it's a percentage, the sting is much less.) Instead, the money would all be there the whole time. On the investor side, it would be like VC: most people would produce standard returns (let's say 5-15k a year), while a few Elon Musks and Larry Ellisons would return billions - I'm sure many universities would be happy to occasionally get one of those. In any case, there's no way it could be /worse/ than the system we have now.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  10% of all future income The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    Percentage is definitely up for debate. Maybe MIT/Harvard/Stanford could do 8-10% and University of Whatever could do 4%. Or maybe they could vary it based on projected likely future earnings or some other factors. In any case, if the option was there, I'm sure many would take it. I would.
knagra 11y ago
Requiring a degree for a job that doesn't utilize the information the acquisition of which the degree is meant to connote is clearly untenable. That's a given. The author is on point about market demands for higher education being inflated but is way off base about the value and role of education in society and economy, and his dismissal of Bernie Sanders's proposal for free higher education is similarly untenable. The main failing in the author's argument is a poor framing of the issue. The author assumes that the economy and society can be planned without acknowledging the social harm a planned economy and society will necessarily cause. Furthermore, the author assumes that our economy and society can be planned - a false assumption - and that the government's primary role is in planning the lives of its citizens rather than assuring their lives, liberty, and opportunity - a very dangerous one. The author frames education as a doorway to a career, when in truth it is more akin to a hallway allowing access to many more doors than are available without it. Worst of all, the author is completely incorrect about the main pressures causing a rise in the price of education. Take the argument not to allow free education as per the Sanders proposal. To reduce it to absurdity, what impetus is there for us to educate plumbers beyond middle school (8th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What impetus is there for us to educate fast food workers beyond elementary school (6th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What reason at all is there to educate police officers? From what I know of the profession, they aim at POC regardless of whether there's a multiple homicide or a birthday party in progress; such simple instructions require no education. The impetus is that we don't live in a planned economy and society. We don't know who will be what when, and we don't want to enforce that such decisions be made once and for all at any point in a person's life. A kid might want to be a fast food worker, like his dad, in 1st grade; a firefighter, like the men who recently saved his little sister from a house fire, in 6th grade; a police officer, to eradicate the drugs ruining his neighborhood, in 12th grade; a lawyer, to protect the poor renters like his parents from being evicted due to gentrification, as an undergrad; a software engineer, to his account book back into the black, when he fails to get into a law school. Individual lives are very chaotic and our expectations of what we want to do change throughout our lives. And in facilitating our ability to dynamically change course, education is the cornerstone. It's easy to look at the current occupation of a person and say, "You're a software engineer. You didn't need any of those Legal Studies courses or History courses or Latin-American studies courses.", but to do so is to dehumanize the person and her life experience, it is to discount her earlier hopes and dreams and ambitions, her current regrets and pains and struggle, it is to shrink wrap a person inside her professional title and place her on a supermarket shelf, deriding her "extra, useless" ingredients while doing so. In this the author is also incorrect in distilling the value of education to the knowledge a degree or diploma is meant to proclaim. Education is also an experience. It's a breather while we choose course. Our economy is becoming so dynamic and unpredictable for such large sectors that during our middle years (30s-50s) and even soon after college, many of us change professions to more profitable sectors. And that's nothing to say about what we want to accomplish with our time on this planet. Those questions loom forever large on the horizon for much of our lives. College allows us to interact with thousands of others in a similar lost state. A college town is filled with mapmakers trying to see which way to go to "get there." Interacting with them gives a person the ability to see a little bit more of what her possibilities and potential can be. College helps those of us who are still lost after high school to get unlost. And even college is proving insufficient as a compass and square. Many, if not most, of us are still lost after college. Moreover, we don't want to be living in a planned economy or society. We have done that before in the developed world, and much of the 2nd and 3rd world is doing that now. And along which lines would be plan our economy? Would we tie down youngsters to what they want to do at age 22? 18? 14? 12? 6? Would we force them to pursue their parents' profession? Answers to such questions are the basis of a very draconian government. The "waste" of extra education is the price we must pay to allow ourselves varied opportunities and possibilities. Sanders is correct in urging the US to universally pay for higher education. Sanders's call is especially urgent to us as we are finding that many of us must go back to college or night classes much later in life to work for the remaining 10, 15, 20 years before the government will allow us to retire with enough in Social Security to live comfortably. Many middle-aged workers are finding themselves without work after the effects of the ongoing high tech revolution. Going or returning to college at the government's expense would allow them to take time and resources to direct their lives in a direction more desirable for them. In fact, Sanders's proposal, if it were to include living expenses as well as tuition, would be an excellent solution to homelessness. Not only would we be providing food and shelter, we would be providing a chance at a more meaningful life for those who deem it more meaningful and can't afford it. The tech industry and its moguls are quite taken to pointing to a few outliers and saying that college is not essential, and to encourage college and high school students to drop out and pursue their dreams, entirely dismissing that those dreams might change in a year or even a month. The underlying assumption is that we magically know what to do with our lives at all times. But the truth is closer to most of us being lost throughout our lives. Dropping out and pursuing your life dream is great for those few for whom it works (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos comes to mind), but the plan fails for a much greater number of us who end up going back to college anyway to improve our station in life at least. I am suspicious as to whether the rising, oft frivolous degree requirements for many professions is due in part to a higher availability of such degrees. Why hire a high school graduate when you can get a more woman who graduated with a BA in History to do your firefighting? The woman holding the BA has demonstrated that she is smart and gets things done - at least enough to get a BA in History. If History BAs are applying, it should increase the requirements of getting the firefighting job. To turn the author's argument on its head, I assert that there is higher demand for education not because some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary, but because more of us are pursuing higher education to direct or re-stabilize our lives and some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary because it is becoming pore plentiful and readily available in our economy and society. And that's a good thing. People should be better educated, especially in the Liberal Arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education) and Humanities. It would dramatically increase the quality of life for all of us. Or at least it would stop repeated isolated incidents of young Black men getting shot in this country. As a last thought, I'm reminded of a recent NY Times (?) article posted on HN which ended with something akin to "Everyone is sure college isn't right for everyone, except their own kids." Long post. Sorry for any mistakes.
Nomentatus 11y ago
I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT! Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.) Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.
- SilasX 11y ago
  The top post [1] mentions the "Meditations on Moloch" post, which is basically a generalization of the PD/Tragedy of the Commons/arms race. I assume most posters are aware of the relevant dynamic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686
  - Nomentatus 11y ago
    PD shows up as one of ten examples of traps in that long article. Note too that not every local minima is going to be a PD, or even close! Equilibria are sometimes now confused with PDs, due to the publicity given to Nash's Equilibrium, but that's a popular confusion.
- knagra 11y ago
  Let's assume the situation with higher education is a prisoner's dilemma. I, as a player, decide not to go to college (cooperate), while everyone else decides to go to college (defect), resulting in me paying a sucker's payoff since my opportunities are reduced while those of everyone else are expanded. So far so good. Next, I decide to go to college while everyone else also goes to college (defect & defect), I pay a not insubstantial amount of money, as does everyone else. So far so good. But I manage to get a job as a software engineer at Google making $125k/year while several of Everyone-Else-in-the-World only get jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven, making $15k/year. So, the punishment scenario doesn't pan out since I didn't have a sucker's payoff while several others in the world did. That's okay. Let's keep going. Next, I decide not to go to college while everyone else decides not to go to college (cooperate & cooperate). All of a sudden, there are thousands of recently fired professors, instructors, deans, janitors, cooks, etc. on the job market. I can't find a job along with many others of my generation who decided not to go to college. Many of us have a sucker's payoff during the reward scenario. The situation with education is not a prisoner's dilemma. Q.E.D. The situation with education is not a tragedy of the commons. There is no central, collective resource that is being exploited by individuals for their own benefit, without regard for the future of the resource. Now, there might be a tragedy of the commons if higher education was universally free and everyone decided to pursue higher education endlessly, with new institutions popping up continuously, which would dry up the treasury and halt the program of universally free higher education. But there is no universally free education. The situation with education is extremely complex, with a variety of intricacies and unknown unknowns. It can't be distilled into a game or an aphorism.

83 points by evanpw 11y ago

The author was doing great right up until the last paragraph. His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. Then there is also the large grey area in between, in which a university education in certain fields might be useful but not essential. What he would do is abolish the right of those professions in which such an education is essential from applying the same standard he lauds earlier: that physicians must attend medical school. For engineers, a university education with a specialty in engineering is exactly what medical school is to physicians. Many people here believe that a university education is not required to be a computer programmer, and I agree. But programmer is a vocation, like plumber or firefighter; it requires specialized skills and experience to do well but does not require a university education. If you spent 3 months learning one language and one or two common frameworks for making e-commerce sites, you are reasonably qualified to work on e-commerce sites for companies that use that language and framework. However, being a programmer and being an engineer are not the same; an engineer has been educated both more broadly and more deeply, and should be capable of solving larger and more difficult problems, designing whole systems, and in general should have the education and experience to understand new problems more thoroughly. It's the difference between the architect who designs a building (or one of its systems) and the construction crew who erects it. Both are essential, but they have (properly) different qualifications. There are many other fields where some sort of education is required. I agree that many of those fields conveniently piggyback on university education (usually with a particular field of study requirement) when other similar mechanisms might do as well. But the notion that such an education is universally irrelevant is absurd. If the author wants people without university education to be paid as much as people with it, the solution is not legislation. Instead, he should hire them.

mrestko 11y ago
I also think that there is no practical way his solution could work, at least not with the laws the way they are. How would you ask people to explain gaps in their work history? Are you no longer allowed to consider why someone was unemployed for 4 or 5 consecutive years? Additionally, I don't think you can easily do general intelligence testing for a job. You have to be able to show that every question relates to job performance and that it does not cause a disproportionate impact on the hiring of people from protected classes.
randomdata 11y ago
His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?
- nmrm2 11y ago
  > If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think? It is trivially easy to think up questions that any Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour. The question is how to ask questions that matter for a particular job. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this.
  - greenyoda 11y ago
    "If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this." But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

andrewvc 11y ago

People have a hard time separating the value of an entrenched institution from whether it's a good value. More school is often good, but that doesn't make it a good deal. Every time the discussion of cs degrees comes up here it's followed by an avalanche of people saying how college gave them this and that and then a story about the one idiot they used to work with who didn't go to college. I went to two years of community college and have never had student loan debt. I've worked on harder problems than many cs grads have. I've gone farther and actually retained more knowledge. I got a great deal taking the path I've followed.

grendelt 11y ago

Yeah, no thanks. I prefer doctors and lawyers that have gone to school rather than watching MOOC videos on a bus.

white-flame 11y ago
You missed the point. Doctors in the US take 4 years of generally medically-unrelated undergraduate schooling before they're allowed into medical school. Why not just allow them into medical school?
- BashiBazouk 11y ago
  Actually the author forgets to mention that you can have any major to get in to medical school but many medical schools still require quite a few core courses you are expected to complete while in undergrad including two years of Chemistry, a year of math, physics and writing.
mrestko 11y ago
In the article, he explicitly compares American doctors with Irish doctors. They both go to school, but the Americans go for about three additional years. There is apparently no real difference in medical outcomes.

white-flame 11y ago

I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons. Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagle Scout or a Navy Seal in terms of a generally impressive life accomplishment. Shuffling everybody through the same system is useless, wastes everybody's time and money, and devalues the magic paper gotten in the end. Many skilled professions require training, and specific training institutions are all well and good. But let's not confuse training to become a mechanical engineer or doctor as being equivalent in an employment eligibility sense to more enrichment-oriented university degrees. The latter being required to get a sales/front-desk/entry-level position is a burgeoning and absolutely needless weight on our entire society. Conflating the former with the more heady University worldview is also odd, and eliminates eligibility for those who would be great in their field but are not that compatible with academia.

mrestko 11y ago
He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".
- pjscott 11y ago
  His argument on this point is short enough that it's worth just quoting entire: > (Yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)
  - rnprince 11y ago
    Personally, I'd say yes to his question - and indeed, this is a question, not an argument; and it's a question that presumes a knee-jerk reaction against Medieval History majors... Gross world product has been growing along an exponential function for some time, and machines are threatening to allow us to be comfortable even if we don't work as much as we physically can. Maybe giving everyone some years in their youth to enrich their lives would be a good way to organize the economy once it's a viable option. Maybe a lot of people agree with this, and in wealthier nations it's ~just~ now close to being within reach, but it isn't quite there, so what we're feeling would be considered friction in the transition.

salmonet 11y ago

I seldom refer to knowledge I gained from university classes. It was an important signaling device and a great time socially, but it was not an efficient use of my time as far as preparing to be successful in my career. I would be surprised if there isn't a good alternative to higher education for bright kids 10 years from now, but I don't think it will have anything to do with legislation.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
I still get a lot out of the systems approach to engineering from my university classes. Still, this is something that could be taught in weeks instead of years.
rhino369 11y ago
The knowledge you gain is only part of it. You also learn how to learn by thinking critically. So yea, that course on how to fabricate a diode using 1990's technology, wasn't useful, but when I had to learn how to manufacture NAND flash using current technology learning it wasn't nearly as hard.

BashiBazouk 11y ago

So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?

logician76 11y ago
Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..
- throwaway342526 11y ago
  It's not wrong. Making something free means paying for it in a transparent fashion. Bernie Sanders is not talking about changing the institutional structure of college such that it somehow has no cost to provide. He is talking about the government paying that cost on behalf of students. I agree with free education, by the way. We currently spend our budgets on much less useful things. But let's be honest about what it means and how it works.
  - logician76 11y ago
    Yes it is wrong, paying the cost of education at cost (for a government), or paying students to pay market prices (inflated by perception of value) is a huge difference. Which do you think Bernie Sanders was implying?
    - throwaway342526 11y ago
      Bernie is not suggesting nationalizing all american colleges. That would be absurd.
      - logician76 11y ago
        In real life there are more possibilities in between 0 and 1.. Also look at how its done in other countries. Apparently americans can go to Germany to study for free in a recent article. Absurd indeed.

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Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago

Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down. However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hope of getting out. Scott has a post on these awful equilbriua called Meditations on Moloch that's pretty depressing:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ I can see one way of maybe getting out of this. If one nice country was to implement this examination-based approach and then offer citizinship to those who score very well on a "general degree examination" (basically an intelligence test) they might be able to setup a brain-drain dynamic that would maybe push us out of this awfulness. Said country could even subsidise the very brightest with the equivalent of a signing bonus. Even a permanent no-strings-attached basic income for the brightest of the bright would be very cheap as they're so rare, and may be worth it for the positive externalities as they're the type of people who build new industries. "We'll pay you to live, work, learn, and be credentialed here" may be enough to dull the luster of the ivies.

Turing_Machine 11y ago
Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures). A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of actual working code in it is much better than an hour of writing pseudocode on a whiteboard.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  Of course they are a proxy, but they are much better and cheaper proxies. I was assuming that credentialism would remain - examination-based degrees make credentialism much less costly.

morgante 11y ago

> App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking. No they don't. I have never once considered a recent bootcamp graduate to be equivalently talented and knowledgeable as a recent CS graduate. Their earnings difference certainly reflects this. (Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad.)

ThrustVectoring 11y ago
>Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.
- morgante 11y ago
  > I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.
  - ThrustVectoring 11y ago
    "Less probable" is still competing for the same jobs. Perhaps not as well, but competing nonetheless.
    - nmrm2 11y ago
      I call this the Einstein fallacy. It says that quality Q is of questionable relevance/utility/value because there exist people without quality Q that do X, even though the vast majority of people who do X have quality Q. But that argument is kind of insane. If you want a job at Google, you're much better off getting a degree from a good university. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional. (EDIT: And no, App Academy graduates do not -- on balance -- compete for the same jobs as recent Stanford graduates. On balance, they compete for very different jobs and have far lower starting salaries. The existence of exceptional outliers is not a good basis for policy or decision making.) (edit2: whoever just downvoted every single post I made on this article: the reply button is there for a reason :-) Otherwise, the early career salary for Stanford is $97,100. Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?)

Futurebot 11y ago

We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm... Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer it be universities themselves) give you a full ride (not just tuition, but books, room and board, transport, food, etc.) and you'd pay them out of your gross income after you graduate. The big difference is that just about anyone who is willing to give up the percentage could get it. Sticker shock and rising bills do not come into play. Right now, you're at the mercy of the financial aid system and all its fickleness (relatives make too much/too little, you have too many/too few assets, you are in a high CoL area and loans don't cover anywhere near what you need, the amount they're willing to give you shifts with the political winds, etc.) The advantages of this system are that you would never have to worry about your relatives being able to fund you; you wouldn't need to work while going to school; you would not need to reapply each year and hope you get enough; and there's no issues with bankruptcy or anything else (the obligation would be non-dischargeable, just like now, but since it's a percentage, the sting is much less.) Instead, the money would all be there the whole time. On the investor side, it would be like VC: most people would produce standard returns (let's say 5-15k a year), while a few Elon Musks and Larry Ellisons would return billions - I'm sure many universities would be happy to occasionally get one of those. In any case, there's no way it could be /worse/ than the system we have now.

nmrm2 11y ago
10% of all future income The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.
- Futurebot 11y ago
  Percentage is definitely up for debate. Maybe MIT/Harvard/Stanford could do 8-10% and University of Whatever could do 4%. Or maybe they could vary it based on projected likely future earnings or some other factors. In any case, if the option was there, I'm sure many would take it. I would.

knagra 11y ago

Requiring a degree for a job that doesn't utilize the information the acquisition of which the degree is meant to connote is clearly untenable. That's a given. The author is on point about market demands for higher education being inflated but is way off base about the value and role of education in society and economy, and his dismissal of Bernie Sanders's proposal for free higher education is similarly untenable. The main failing in the author's argument is a poor framing of the issue. The author assumes that the economy and society can be planned without acknowledging the social harm a planned economy and society will necessarily cause. Furthermore, the author assumes that our economy and society can be planned - a false assumption - and that the government's primary role is in planning the lives of its citizens rather than assuring their lives, liberty, and opportunity - a very dangerous one. The author frames education as a doorway to a career, when in truth it is more akin to a hallway allowing access to many more doors than are available without it. Worst of all, the author is completely incorrect about the main pressures causing a rise in the price of education. Take the argument not to allow free education as per the Sanders proposal. To reduce it to absurdity, what impetus is there for us to educate plumbers beyond middle school (8th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What impetus is there for us to educate fast food workers beyond elementary school (6th grade)? From what I know of the profession, most of the education they will utilize has already been acquired. What reason at all is there to educate police officers? From what I know of the profession, they aim at POC regardless of whether there's a multiple homicide or a birthday party in progress; such simple instructions require no education. The impetus is that we don't live in a planned economy and society. We don't know who will be what when, and we don't want to enforce that such decisions be made once and for all at any point in a person's life. A kid might want to be a fast food worker, like his dad, in 1st grade; a firefighter, like the men who recently saved his little sister from a house fire, in 6th grade; a police officer, to eradicate the drugs ruining his neighborhood, in 12th grade; a lawyer, to protect the poor renters like his parents from being evicted due to gentrification, as an undergrad; a software engineer, to his account book back into the black, when he fails to get into a law school. Individual lives are very chaotic and our expectations of what we want to do change throughout our lives. And in facilitating our ability to dynamically change course, education is the cornerstone. It's easy to look at the current occupation of a person and say, "You're a software engineer. You didn't need any of those Legal Studies courses or History courses or Latin-American studies courses.", but to do so is to dehumanize the person and her life experience, it is to discount her earlier hopes and dreams and ambitions, her current regrets and pains and struggle, it is to shrink wrap a person inside her professional title and place her on a supermarket shelf, deriding her "extra, useless" ingredients while doing so. In this the author is also incorrect in distilling the value of education to the knowledge a degree or diploma is meant to proclaim. Education is also an experience. It's a breather while we choose course. Our economy is becoming so dynamic and unpredictable for such large sectors that during our middle years (30s-50s) and even soon after college, many of us change professions to more profitable sectors. And that's nothing to say about what we want to accomplish with our time on this planet. Those questions loom forever large on the horizon for much of our lives. College allows us to interact with thousands of others in a similar lost state. A college town is filled with mapmakers trying to see which way to go to "get there." Interacting with them gives a person the ability to see a little bit more of what her possibilities and potential can be. College helps those of us who are still lost after high school to get unlost. And even college is proving insufficient as a compass and square. Many, if not most, of us are still lost after college. Moreover, we don't want to be living in a planned economy or society. We have done that before in the developed world, and much of the 2nd and 3rd world is doing that now. And along which lines would be plan our economy? Would we tie down youngsters to what they want to do at age 22? 18? 14? 12? 6? Would we force them to pursue their parents' profession? Answers to such questions are the basis of a very draconian government. The "waste" of extra education is the price we must pay to allow ourselves varied opportunities and possibilities. Sanders is correct in urging the US to universally pay for higher education. Sanders's call is especially urgent to us as we are finding that many of us must go back to college or night classes much later in life to work for the remaining 10, 15, 20 years before the government will allow us to retire with enough in Social Security to live comfortably. Many middle-aged workers are finding themselves without work after the effects of the ongoing high tech revolution. Going or returning to college at the government's expense would allow them to take time and resources to direct their lives in a direction more desirable for them. In fact, Sanders's proposal, if it were to include living expenses as well as tuition, would be an excellent solution to homelessness. Not only would we be providing food and shelter, we would be providing a chance at a more meaningful life for those who deem it more meaningful and can't afford it. The tech industry and its moguls are quite taken to pointing to a few outliers and saying that college is not essential, and to encourage college and high school students to drop out and pursue their dreams, entirely dismissing that those dreams might change in a year or even a month. The underlying assumption is that we magically know what to do with our lives at all times. But the truth is closer to most of us being lost throughout our lives. Dropping out and pursuing your life dream is great for those few for whom it works (Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos comes to mind), but the plan fails for a much greater number of us who end up going back to college anyway to improve our station in life at least. I am suspicious as to whether the rising, oft frivolous degree requirements for many professions is due in part to a higher availability of such degrees. Why hire a high school graduate when you can get a more woman who graduated with a BA in History to do your firefighting? The woman holding the BA has demonstrated that she is smart and gets things done - at least enough to get a BA in History. If History BAs are applying, it should increase the requirements of getting the firefighting job. To turn the author's argument on its head, I assert that there is higher demand for education not because some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary, but because more of us are pursuing higher education to direct or re-stabilize our lives and some jobs are requiring education when it is unnecessary because it is becoming pore plentiful and readily available in our economy and society. And that's a good thing. People should be better educated, especially in the Liberal Arts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education) and Humanities. It would dramatically increase the quality of life for all of us. Or at least it would stop repeated isolated incidents of young Black men getting shot in this country. As a last thought, I'm reminded of a recent NY Times (?) article posted on HN which ended with something akin to "Everyone is sure college isn't right for everyone, except their own kids." Long post. Sorry for any mistakes.

Nomentatus 11y ago

I've just searched what are now 58 comments for the phrase "prisoner's dilemma" and got zero hits. WHAT! Higher Education is now a prisoner's dilemma, and that's really the point of the tulip article, even if he didn't use the phrase. Rational actors will want their children to have a college education and then higher degrees, even though everyone choosing that makes society worse off, not better off. Classic prisoner's dilemma. (Also a "Tragedy of the Commons", I would argue.) Perhaps the most profound argument against our present system of higher education is that despite his philosophy degree (and I'm guessing at least 70 or 80 other degrees amongst the commentators) neither the author nor anyone else has said the two words "prisoner's dilemma." It's a simple concept, taught in every University, most undergraduates supposedly know what it is, and yet nobody can manage to recognize a gargantuan real world example! (I have yet to see the term PD applied to this subject in other media, either.) Time to scrap them crenellated white towers.

SilasX 11y ago
The top post [1] mentions the "Meditations on Moloch" post, which is basically a generalization of the PD/Tragedy of the Commons/arms race. I assume most posters are aware of the relevant dynamic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9671686
- Nomentatus 11y ago
  PD shows up as one of ten examples of traps in that long article. Note too that not every local minima is going to be a PD, or even close! Equilibria are sometimes now confused with PDs, due to the publicity given to Nash's Equilibrium, but that's a popular confusion.
knagra 11y ago
Let's assume the situation with higher education is a prisoner's dilemma. I, as a player, decide not to go to college (cooperate), while everyone else decides to go to college (defect), resulting in me paying a sucker's payoff since my opportunities are reduced while those of everyone else are expanded. So far so good. Next, I decide to go to college while everyone else also goes to college (defect & defect), I pay a not insubstantial amount of money, as does everyone else. So far so good. But I manage to get a job as a software engineer at Google making $125k/year while several of Everyone-Else-in-the-World only get jobs as clerks at 7-Eleven, making $15k/year. So, the punishment scenario doesn't pan out since I didn't have a sucker's payoff while several others in the world did. That's okay. Let's keep going. Next, I decide not to go to college while everyone else decides not to go to college (cooperate & cooperate). All of a sudden, there are thousands of recently fired professors, instructors, deans, janitors, cooks, etc. on the job market. I can't find a job along with many others of my generation who decided not to go to college. Many of us have a sucker's payoff during the reward scenario. The situation with education is not a prisoner's dilemma. Q.E.D. The situation with education is not a tragedy of the commons. There is no central, collective resource that is being exploited by individuals for their own benefit, without regard for the future of the resource. Now, there might be a tragedy of the commons if higher education was universally free and everyone decided to pursue higher education endlessly, with new institutions popping up continuously, which would dry up the treasury and halt the program of universally free higher education. But there is no universally free education. The situation with education is extremely complex, with a variety of intricacies and unknown unknowns. It can't be distilled into a game or an aphorism.