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Comment by RomanBob | Hacker News Reader

University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.

We want to delude ourselves that everybody has the capability to be a doctor, programmer, engineer, successful business owner etc. We ban employees from using IQ tests, when SAT scores correlate strongly with IQ. Then the best companies hire from the best universities where the best students with the highest SAT go i.e. they just hire the highest IQ people in each year slot.

To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody, as if a degree is in a vacuum a token of value and not the fact that a degree is relatively scarce. A degree when everybody has one isn't worth as much as when only 50% of people have one.

And of course the law of supply/demand makes degrees more expensive when everybody has one, but makes the degrees less useful economically when everybody has one. Double-dipped.

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> University is just an overpriced IQ test anyway.

Only from the point of view of employment market, and only when job skills and university material are widely disparate. (But universities do have a role beyond the employment market.)

> To fund this delusion we would then have to make university available to everybody,

Do you mean university admission or university degrees? In many European countries admission is unlimited. For example several German computer science programs are open to anyone for free, with no SAT-like test requirement to get admitted. Whether you'll pass your exams is a different question.

And arguably if it's all about IQ testing, it should be for free, so you filter for high IQ instead of for kids of wealthy parents.

You're effectively claiming that university teaches nothing, but good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.

Added to that, your final grade indicates ability x effort. This is significantly more useful than a narrow measure of ability alone.

> good degrees teach independence, critical thinking (analysis, synthesis), research skills, writing, teamworking, presentation skills, and much more.

Sadly there aren't a lot of those. Most degrees teach regurgitating what a textbook says in a fancy way that means you pass the "I understood it" test.

My middle of the road state school CS program was nothing like that. I can remember exactly 1 CS class where memorizing the text book was remotely useful.

I was an Econ major in college, which is one of the most popular majors across all schools in the US. I don't remember even having a textbook beyond the first couple of statistics courses. We were only ever graded on problem sets or term papers with some kind of statistical analysis component.

That said, my American Economic History course was easily one of the most eye-opening learning experiences, and absolutely one of those courses where "I understood the reading" was necessary. It greatly expanded by ability to understand why the economic story played out the way it did, and how much of it was based on the societal and political context of the times, and not on the findings of bean counters doing stat analyses.

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