"DIY U": The End of University Prestige
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The reason the UK has more entry methods is because there are far fewer universities than in the US. Having moved to California from the UK when I was 24, CA has far more "universities" that specialize in teaching. The State school and Community College system doesn't exist in the UK... that's why there are all the internships.
Finally, the author seems to assign all value in a university from what you learned in lectures. That's a flawed premise: the lectures are there to spur you on to learn outside of contact time. Developing all those skills, meeting all those like minded people, having an ecosystem where you can work on the student newspaper to get more skills... those are things that distributed learning doesn't offer.
University != undergraduate lectures.
And that's exactly the problem. Why pay to attend an institution that does not care about your studies?
There are a few profs who really care about the students. The rest just watch for the select few that can succeed in spite of the system, and pick them for grad school.
Because you're paying for environment, education, peer group, opportunity, and credibility...not hugs.
Rather, they are about the peers you go to school with. You learn and grow from the type of people you surround yourself with, and at elite universities you surround yourself with extraordinarily smart people.
Edit: Did some research; it mostly seems to have failed. Some examples: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ http://udsled.ning.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA
MIT is deadly serious about undergraduate education, to the point where if a professor violates certain rules (e.g. no homework of X sort N days before final exams), a committee charged with this sort of thing will take the course away from the professor.
I was also once an employee who's office happened to be in the complex that included the EECS undergraduate HQ. One term a very good professor inexplicably did a horrible job of teaching 6.002 (or maybe 3, but I think it was 2). I read every one of the student course evaluations and with one special case exception they were uniformly negative with plenty of specificity. Then, due to the open office nature of that complex, I got to listen to the department head force the professor to read every single one of them, and then be told he'd never, ever be allowed to teach that course again (which he took very hard, since this is an area the professor really cares about).
In all my personal experiences of taking courses, the professors were seriously dedicated to teaching, although obviously their ability to teach varied. But they tried, and some also would devote a little time to telling us about their research, how it excited them and they tried to give us a little facility in what it was all about. Generally the latter failed, but they seldom failed to get across how something as dry as say physical chemistry might be very interesting.
E.g. MIT does not grade on the curve; that would be insane, instead they grade on mastery of material. I've e.g. never heard of someone sabotaging another work to improve their own grade, we're all in it together and tend to help each other out.
As for costs, about 5 minutes with Google suggests a 5x difference compared to average state school tuition costs. Based on my experience, the difference in teaching quality is a LOT more than 1.5x, but I wouldn't be able to pin it down.
I'd say the real asset is not the student body per se, but the whole community and the ingrained meritocratic attitudes. It's assumed by default that everyone at MIT is serious about what they're doing (which of course is not 100% academics, not that we've ever managed to top CalTech's Rose Bowl hack :-), and there's a tremendous amount of respect all around.
It's said that undergraduates are treated like grad students (and that includes serious cutting edge research (e.g. through UROP; in both my experiences there, the problems had not been solved, period)) and grad students like junior facility, and on up for faculity (except, I will add, everyone in the Math Department is treated like shit, but it's not entirely horrible (my first job was maintaining a computer system in that department)).
And in the end, if you're trying to get into a good grad school, which is the better foundation? If you care about how your resume impresses people and opens doors, which school would you rather have on it (note that in lower quality tech areas MIT envy doesn't make this entirely a good thing, but then again it acts as a filtering function).
My argument is: As competitiveness\exclusivity of a university increases, the quality of the student body increases at a much faster rate than the quality of instruction.
I once took a single semester at a local state school in the middle of my college career solely to get cheap credits for a new university\department I was transferring to. The professors were still very bright, had PhDs, and repeatedly encouraged students to come into their office (the vast majority didn't). They were however ALL foreign, from India, eastern europe, or china. In addition, the one programming class I took was taught by someone who had spent more time in industry than research. Also, they had to teach at a MUCH slower rate than they were capable of to cater to the student body. The limiting factor was the students.
It's significant based on what I've heard of India's famed IITs. They don't have top of the line equipment, their professors aren't always the best; it's their student bodies that make them more than anything else. When you get the very best (in their areas) out of 1 billion people....
As for MIT numbers, you might find these interesting/useful: current yearly applications are something like 13,000, a bit more than 3,000 are judged as being able to do the work (that's the number one thing that's important to MIT; while mistakes are inevitable, it accepts no one who they don't fully believe can make it).
10% of those are "obvious admits" and the admissions staff, augmented by anyone on the staff with a clue who volunteers (especially to make absolutely sure every application gets at least two readings) then agonize over who amongst the rest to offer a slot to. (It's hard and not really fun; I have a very good friend who does this on a time available basis and I helped her a bit one year when I was on the staff.)
MIT shoots for a yield of around 1080 the last time I checked (that figure is old, but is tightly constrained by available student housing, all freshman must spend their first year in it; one year the the admissions office made a big enough mistake they had to turn a graduate dorm's basement into makeshift housing, which perhaps not surprisingly worked out very well (they bonded into a tight and self-supporting group)).
The self-selection in applications is tremendous. Nobody attends MIT who doesn't think they wanted to (that can of course change once they arrive ^_^, but I didn't see much of that in the '80s).
Thanks for the intelligent discussion and observations.
Speaking from personal experience I wouldn't have missed anything if I had skipped the entire high school and college experience because I learned absolutely nothing in classes. All of my current knowledge was gained by either working closely with a mentor or spending time at the library.
I think it will be market-driven.
As the value of credentials relative to demonstrable skill continues to decrease, people will reconsider the proposition of taking on huge debt for a college degree. They'll look for alternative ways to acquire skills, and universities will have to compete by lowering tuition rates and rethinking education. Otherwise they won't attract enough tuition-paying students to cover operation costs. When it comes to the bottom line then administrations will mobilize.
I predict that some universities will make interesting changes (eventually) and many will fail. Just hoping none are "too big to fail".
So as long as there is at least one department out there that is not feeling the crunch the math department will not do anything differently and there is always at least one technical department that does well no matter how good or bad the economy is. So from the other department's perspective it is a good idea to offload as much of the screening of students to the math department as possible since who really wants to spend time with undergrads when there are multimillion dollar grant proposals to submit to bring in money. From the math department's perspective it is a good idea to offer as many variations of the same course adapted to different departments as possible and from the book store's perspective it is a good idea to keep reselling old books at high prices. You tell me which one is going to innovate and get the others to go along with them. Each will cling to their old ways for as long as possible because honestly there is no real competition. The only way to get a piece of paper with B.S. and your name on it is to go to a big name accredited university.
Long reply because I've been thinking about this problem for a long time now and I don't see any real way to force research oriented universities to innovate. There is no real incentive for innovation.
But having the piece of paper is starting to matter less [1]. Most people want a degree so they can get a better job, but who would you rather hire as a developer: someone who spent 4 years getting decent grades and a CS degree, or someone who spent 4 years contributing to open source projects and teaching themselves to hack? Of course some employers would choose the former, but a smart one would at least strongly consider the latter.
What does this mean for families? Many will undoubtedly continue supporting the institutions, but others may question the merit of spending years saving for and paying off debt from college when there are alternatives available. It's easy to imagine cheaper ways to work with mentors and spend time at the library, after all. :)
[1] Trends would suggest that the paper actually matters more now than ever, due to degree inflation, but I think this will prove itself to be a bubble.
Now, having personal contact and a network throws all of this out the window. I don't have a CS degree, I've never gotten a job offer without someone having personally reviewed my application. A friend in HR says they use software that looks for competitors (aka work experience), degrees, languages in that order.
How about people attending less prestigious schools?
Now, having personal contact and a network throws all of this out the window.
Exactly, and this is part of what makes open source exciting. Want an internship at Google? Becoming a key contributor to Chromium OS is arguably a better strategy than going back to school, because if you're good you can get a Google employee to notice you.
Nothing wrong with less prestigious schools, but most are specialized in a few focused areas. My own school is not a prestigious school, but it is in engineering and biomed.
But this doesn't give a strong brand like leading universities have.
For me, the people I got to know during studies, and cemented the relationship during various activities not directly related to my field of studies, have proved to be of more value than the lectures attended. Aside from few basic courses that lay the groundwork, my CS studies have been repeated exercise in rapidly getting to know a field enough not to appear incompetent and pass the tests. Granted, this has helped me to the point where I can quickly find solid ground to stand on when thrown in a new technological field, but still, in the last year of my studies, I am working with technologies that have been at best mentioned in couple slides in somewhat related lectures, following methodology that has had been only passingly referenced. The field moves so fast, that by the time someone has developed a good course material on something, it's already yesterdays news. Technologies come and go, but the dude you that woke you the next day after a wild party because a test would be starting in half hour, he will last. And you can't replace that experience with Facebook or Second Life.
It's just an immature paradigm still. Obviously the web has proven itself to be an outstanding medium for peer-to-peer socialization, and it's only a matter of time before online education taps into this.
However, I think if the average "intelligence" (however you want to define that) is higher than the population at large, it's more that the lower ~30-50% of the intelligence spectrum is severely underrepresented, and the upper 1% is maybe twice as common as you'd expect. There's still plenty of people with normal talents.
All of which is to say that the prestige of my undergraduate education far outweighs what it might actually be worth. While there might be a significant cultural shift, I frankly think that the cultural bias is too ingrained to change radically any time soon. What I think is likely to happen is that self-designed courses of study are more likely to become perfectly acceptable alternatives, rather than something stigmatized as weird.