Comment by spoondan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spoondan | Hacker News Reader

This is a very strange article and premise to me. A university education is not vocational training. A CS education includes courses in programming, but learning to program—indeed, learning CS—is only a part of the education you are signing up for at university.

I arrived at university having already worked for a couple years in open source and a bit of contracting. I worked as a professional programmer throughout my undergraduate degree. I was bored by most of the introductory programming courses. The liberal arts, being around other young adults, the theoretical CS parts, the electrical engineering bits, and some of the project work were the only valuable parts, but that was plenty of value to me.

Going to university to learn to program is like going to university to learn refrigerator repair or how to play the guitar. Vocational and on-the-job training will go deeper into the craft. If you only want vocational training, go to a vocational school, get a private teacher, or teach yourself. Don’t go to university just to learn a skill. You certainly can, but it’s not an efficient way to do that. People study music in university to become better rounded musicians, not to learn an instrument. Same with CS.

> This is a very strange article and premise to me. A university education is not vocational training.

I know right? Stupid plebeians expecting to get something that will help them earn a living out of spending three or four years learning something and foregoing the earnings they could have made in that time. If you don’t know that university is for signaling your social class rather than learning skills that will be useful in earning a living why are you even there?

At least the nerds who think university is about learning don’t have the stink of trade about them.

The purpose of a university is research. They teach undergraduate courses so they can get more researchers to further academia. The university isn't interested in anything else.

If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.

If the goal of a university was research it wouldn’t have any undergraduate students and it probably wouldn’t teach Master’s students either. Some external organization would educate future researchers and then they’d hire them.

So you’d either have a graduate studies only university, like the European University Institute in Florence or Rockefeller University or a research institute like the Max Planck Gesellschaft, RAND, SRI International or the Institutes for Advanced Study.

The idea that research is even a part of the core mission of universities is at most 200 years old. They’ve always been traded schools for theology, medicine and law and latterly finishing schools for the upper classes but the research university emerged in Germany with Alexander von Humboldt.

Most people don’t decide upon goals and then look for the most effective ways to pursue them. They look for the socially approved and known good ways of getting what they want. For the huge majority of university students that means they’re at university because they need a degree to get a job. People with money and people who attended selective universities may think otherwise because they have other or better options but most people know that if they want a decent, respectable living they better get their certificate of middle class membership, their Bachelor’s degree.

Outside of maybe Cal Tech no university sends the majority of its students on to graduate study aimed at producing researchers[1]. They are funded by governments whose voters would be apoplectic to be told education was an afterthought to faculty research. The median college graduate might be capable of doing a Master’s degree but there is no way more than 10% of those who matriculates as university students are capable of becoming researchers if that.

Whatever universities might be of their purpose is research they’re a terrible waste of resources.

> If the goal of a university was research it wouldn’t have any undergraduate students and it probably wouldn’t teach Master’s students either. Some external organization would educate future researchers and then they’d hire them.

What makes you think that the best way of training future researchers isn't having the current researchers train them? This is the model currently used across most universities I think. As part of my degree, I was taught entirely by people who are active researchers in their fields.

> For the huge majority of university students that means they’re at university because they need a degree to get a job.

Yes, and I'd argue this is a negative trait. People should be going to university because they want to learn a thing, not because it's a necessary hoop to jump through to work in a field (unless that field is academia). Fields that require specialist education (law/medicine/etc) already have specialist institutions that do this vocational training.

> The median college graduate might be capable of doing a Master’s degree but there is no way more than 10% of those who matriculates as university students are capable of becoming researchers if that.

But how does the university find that 10%? You presumably can't select effectively, so what better way than to run a 3-4 year program for those who are interested to see if they remain interested enough and are good enough to become a researcher. It doesn't have to have a high conversion rate to be effective.

> The purpose of a university is research. They teach undergraduate courses so they can get more researchers to further academia. The university isn't interested in anything else.

Sorry, but this assertion is so incredibly wrong. At Warwick, where I did my undergraduate degree, 95% of students in my CS cohort were in a professional job 6 months after finishing the course - they're not staying around to do research! The courses are marketed based on earnings potential after graduation. Research grant income is dwarfed by tuition fee income. That's just how it is.

It's just laughable to suggest that universities aren't interested in teaching.

>If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.

I agree with this and it's one of the regrets I had.

> Sorry, but this assertion is so incredibly wrong. At Warwick, where I did my undergraduate degree, 95% of students in my CS cohort were in a professional job 6 months after finishing the course - they're not staying around to do research! The courses are marketed based on earnings potential after graduation. Research grant income is dwarfed by tuition fee income. That's just how it is.

This is in no way contradictory to my original assertion. Of course universities recognize that they're going to lose people after their undergraduate course is finished. But more good quality people applying means more good quality people on the course, which ultimately means better researches. Obviously they'll market based post-degree earning potential, because that attracts better people.

Given a choice between an undergrad leaving for the real world and staying to do a postgrad, they'd always prefer the latter. Warwick would love that 95% figure to be 90%, or lower. An undergrad course where 100% of people left academia after they had completed it would not survive long.

> It's just laughable to suggest that universities aren't interested in teaching.

I worded this badly, but this is not what I suggested. Teaching is a core part of research, because teaching is how you get better researchers. My point is that universities are not interested in furnishing software companies with better quality developers.

I think your issue isn’t with universities and certainly isn’t with me. Reading between the lines, I think your complaint is with the systemic over-valuing of university degrees by parents and industry. That pushes people into universities that don’t want or need the education provided.

If that’s your issue, I completely agree with you. That’s why, in my comment, I actively encouraged people to do vocational training (boot camps) or teach themselves. If you want to learn to program, those are much better ways than to do a CS degree.

That doesn’t make CS worthless. It’s just different. The CS education provided by a university isn’t meant to train you to be a programmer. It’s broader than that. And it’s also, in some ways, deeper because it dives into CS topics that you won’t ever need for work.

I think that’s totally fine. The vocational and university systems have coexisted for a long time and serve different purposes. Pushing people into the university system that are better served by vocational training is an issue. But throwing away the university or pressing it to become purely vocational training is, I think, both unnecessary and deeply harmful to society.

Parents and industry do not over value degrees. They value them for reasons that are mostly, but not entirely, orthogonal to any learning that may occur in university but they value them highly for the excellent reason that they’re a wonderful signal of ability and occasionally what they learned is of some relevance.

CS isn’t worthless. CS is awesome, just like Physics or Philosophy, for those who care about them. Those who have any interest whatsoever in intellectual pursuits are at an absolute maximum 10% of the population. Many more need to get a job and for many of them a university degree is an almost absolute prerequisite. To suggest they forgo it is to do harm to them because there’s the possibility they might listen.

As a society almost everywhere in the first over spends massively on education because while it may be socially wasteful it’s individually rational. It’s a signaling arms race.

Universities have never been primarily for those who had av burning interest in the topic matter. If they became that, forsaking their roots as upper class vocational schools and finishing schools they would be vastly smaller than they are now, in terms both of faculty and student body.

My thanks for such a cordial reply to an intemperate message.

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