Hacker News Reader

Comment by wallace_f | Hacker News Reader

In 2018, with trillions in public and not-for-profit money, and modern info-tech... If a poor kid in India, or anywhere, with an internet wanted to study for a world-class education, is there any legitimately ethical reason everyone should not be able to do this freely, and also be able to earn credentials through exams? Perhaps examinations should carry a modest fee, but why isn't more going into not just open courseware, but open degree programs?

Shouldn't the presitigious universities be finding ways to educate, train and credential as many people as possible, rather than maintaining barriers to entry to their educational materials? Or do we need to perpetuate prestige and social strata through these institutions' selective commitees?

View on HN

Yeah, see that's the whole point of those institutions. It's all just signaling. Harvard could let in twice as many people easily, but then it would stop being the "best school" because acceptance rate affects school ranking.

Instead of focusing on those schools, why don't we as a society try to remove the stigma of going to community college or learning a trade?

Well, and the ratio of faculty to students would be worsened, facilities would get overextended, many students wouldn’t be able to live on campus, etc. I agree with your broader point though and indeed Harvard does have Harvard Extension School and was one of the founders of edX.

> Harvard does have Harvard Extension School

Yes, and my wife is currently pursuing a graduate degree through there. It requires 3 on-site classes, and appears to be just a rigorous as a degree program in person.

"Perhaps examinations should carry a modest fee, but why isn't more going into not just open courseware, but open degree programs?"

"Grading" is really the only thing you are paying for, at this point.

Many of the most prestigious institutions have put their lectures and course materials on line for free.

But it doesn't do you much good to go to an employer and say "I went through all of the materials for all of the courses needed to get this MIT degree, and understood all of it, honest! So you should give me equal consideration as an MIT graduate!"

The employer will be much more likely to hire the candidate who they can verify completed all of the degree requirements by just contacting MIT.

"The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan suggests a framing in which this makes sense. He more or less argues, with data and some interesting points, that the barriers to education are not a bug, and not only a feature, but perhaps the primary economic feature of our education system.

A part of his argument is that people who get into elite schools and don't go to an elite school tend to have approximately the same life outcomes as people who go to elite schools, suggesting that the schools are just filtering for people who will be successful anyway and rubber stamping them.

Another part is that, if education's economic value was through adding value to people by exposing them to valuable ideas and skills, then there should be some correlation between how deeply exposed you are to those resources and your life outcomes, but in reality there's really only a binary between whether or not you finish the degree. 7 semesters of college seems to do nothing significant for you if you don't get a piece of paper to show people, which is very strange if college actually adds any substantial value other than as a filter.

There's more too. It's a polarizing book, but I think his framing is at least approximately correct, as it fits better with how the real world is working than any other framing of education I've seen, and if he's right, then the current paradigm of education is just fundamentally not scaleable, and really needs more fundamental restructuring than just giving it to more people.

I've heard many economists echo this argument.

People who have the opportunity to attend an elite university and decline it would be doing so because their opportunity cost is better.

But the question is still open: why should credentials not be open to fair competition? Shouldn't a poor woman in Africa be able to compete for the same computer science credentials, bar exams, medical exams (this would require further vetting of practical lab skills) as a Harvard student, through the same exams and projects? Of course, Harvard could still give its students its own stamp of approval, but the education and credentials should be open to competition, not behind walled gardens.

But there is no money or prestige in that. Harvard didn't get a $37B endowment by trying to level the playing field.

Granted.

Though MIT publishes many of its course materials online for free.

https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

You mean like the university of London has done for over 100 years: https://london.ac.uk/ways-study/distance-learning

https://london.ac.uk/courses

Currently taking their graduate math diploma, from the London School of Economics (part of university of London),the whole thing will be around $3000, with the registration and exam fees separate, so you only pay for what you use, in a way

only $3,000?

that's 2 years of income for someone living in India.

even for most people living in the UK, that's a big chunk of change

I didn't say "only $3000", you did. I said "you only pay for what you use"

It depends on which credential you're talking about. For some programs, it would be enough to have a book plus a series of lectures, along with the labs to complete and the exams to take. But, there are a few problems that need to be solved, which are not specific to academia.

First is copyright. It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.

Another is communication. This is more important for some programs, particularly the programs where there is heavy discussion involved (instead of just lectures), you need seamless, high-quality, real-time communication between people. And I'm not talking about G.729, or Speex. I'm talking uncompressed wide-band G.722, with low jitter and no packet loss. And at least voice communications is essential, because there is so much information that is lost when communication goes text-only. Ideally the conversation would be video, because there is information lost when you go audio-only.

Both of these issues are things where the for-profit world needs to be leading the way.

Educational institutions will fight for looser copyright restrictions all the time, to the point where the people in charge tune it out. Lobbying is also harder (not impossible, but harder to do), because you can risk the 501(c) status. Having for-profit companies pushing for looser copyright restrictions for education would massively help, by reducing barriers and making people less nervous about distributing material without the threat of copyright claims.

As for communication, the distributed startups have been facing this problem head-on for some time, but I don't think there is a single Body of Knowledge that exists for the way to do one-way (lecture), two-way interactive (Q&A, office hours, etc.) and n-way collaborative (discussion session) most efficiently. It's one thing to talk about theory (we do that really well!), but the people in the startups are living this today. Give us the tried and tested Way To Do It, backed up by your experience.

> It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.

You seem to assume that teaching always requires licensing copyrighted materials from others, like textbooks I guess. In my personal experience, that's not really necessary.

I've experienced higher education in two countries, Germany and China. In Germany, there were no mandatory textbooks. Professors always used materials they created themselves, sometimes just before they were needed, sometimes adapted from previous times the course was taught, sometimes in cooperation with other professors. If you wanted to read more about the topic from a different angle, you were free to read a textbook, but it was completely optional and I never did.

In China, the professors had all been to the US for their PhDs and they used textbooks popular there, always stressing which prestigious universities the book authors were affiliated with. That doesn't mean anyone bought the books. You'd usually get credentials for an FTP server that had all required material.

In neither case any copyrighted works were licensed. In Western countries you'd have to follow the German model, but in countries with less effective copyright enforcement, the Chinese model also works.

> First is copyright. It's difficult enough to get through the copyright issues to produce printed lab material for a class; publishing online adds an additional layer: Material has to be licensed for unlimited distribution, in a way that is compliant with each country's copyright laws.

Most have fair use or fair dealing exemptions covering classroom and exercise use. Can you exemplify a jurisdiction that does not have enough fair use/dealing?

I can't imagine any legal construct anywhere in which classroom use of a textbook that was copyright infringing would fall under fair use. Can you provide some legal reasoning that would support that assertion?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com