Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Given the nature of the HN community, I'm actually surprised by how many pro-college comments I see here. There's maybe a 50/50 split, of pro vs. anti-college sentiment, mostly because colleges are the only place where things like medicine, real STEM, and so forth can be taught.

But I'm floored that college remains such an established institution. With the ridiculous cost and unhelpful nature of a college degree post-graduation (at least for most non-tech/STEM/medicine majors), why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline?

The amount of people I know saddled with student debt who do nothing remotely close to their major, and who didn't even enjoy studying to begin with, is astounding. And this pattern repeats itself in Europe, though somewhat differently. There, instead of starting companies, people get a 6-year long Masters in Entrepreneurship or Marketing or Business, and go on to work unfulfilling middle-management jobs for stagnant, uninspiring companies.

I'm sure this is a prevalent malaise in Asia and developed parts of Africa and LatAm as well.

I don't think free college would fundamentally solve the problem, which is that college delivers very little value for most, and a lot of value for very few. For most studies, it's no longer a good system (IMO).

I think universities have a sort of impossible position.

One direction, heavily pushed by industry and government, is that they should be a sorting mechanism, identifying the best and most capable students so they can be discovered by industry.

Another direction, pushed by government, is that they should be centers of learning and scholarship, capable of producing high quality research and researchers.

These two goals are not mutually exclusive, but they are not particularly compatible, either. Exams are essentially a giant distraction and stressor on the whole learning process, but they are also essential for the first objective. Deep, foundational course material is basically mandatory for the second objective, but the first objective prefers material closer to vocational training.

For the first objective, parents and students know that the best institution is the most prestigious one. For the second one, the best institution is the one with the best researchers and teachers.

For the first objective, it's better (if you can afford it) if the course is incredibly expensive. The biggest predictor of success is the wealth of your parents, so when your peers all have wealthy parents, you are likely to be connected to a large number of successful people.

For the second objective, it's best if school is free, so the truly interested and talented are not excluded.

No doubt, universities are not in a good place.

For me, the position of the university as a societal institution is threefold:

1) Foster deep, foundational learning in an interested and talented portion of the populous.

2) Fund basic research, give academia a home, and further scientific progress.

3) Act as a filtration mechanism.

But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart. The university as an institution is probably best suited to fund research and science. Filtration mechanisms can be established with independent standardized testing and learning programs like Lambda School and OpenClassrooms etc. Deep, foundational learning is possible online, and parts of this learning could be delegated to colleges specialized in specific fields (medicine, technology, etc.).

I would also expect things like community colleges to spring up for associates-degree level education and vocational training.

> 3) Act as a filtration mechanism.

which begs the question - why must university be a filtration system such that others (like employers) get to have a free-ride off of it?

Presumably it's just an unintended consequence of university study and qualification - that employers don't want the expense of sorting out candidates, and that someone capable of graduating with a degree must have some level of competency.

So, what if the gov't make university degree something that employers cannot discriminate with - like race or religion. If they want to ensure their candidate is capable, they can administer a test (or pay a central examination service provider for such a test). A candidate looking for jobs do not require a university degree, but do require taking this test (or have taken a prior test and show the results).

This way, university can remain "pure", rather than a gateway which people pay as an entry-fee for employment.

Employers don't want the liability of sorting. They are outsourcing the legal status of being non-discriminatory.

If a large company were to give an IQ test to every applicant, they would get sued and asked to prove it does not discriminate against a protected class. If a large company hires only from Harvard, they just say that Harvard is non-discriminatory, so that policy is as well

> If a large company were to give an IQ test to every applicant, they would get sued and asked to prove it does not discriminate against a protected class. If a large company hires only from Harvard, they just say that Harvard is non-discriminatory, so that policy is as well

It is just as easy to prove that a pro-elite-university hiring practice has a differential impact on a variety of protected classes as one that uses an IQ test, and there's probably better evidence for lots of jobs that performance is predicted by IQ test results, to overcome the presumption of disparate impact discrimination from the differential impact.

IQ tests, however, have a greater cultural awareness of the potential for illegality, which probably translates to a greater risk of an employee talking to an attorney and thus a suit being filed in the first place.

Hiring from elite universities exclusively is a safer way to discriminate because there's less chance that the victims will seek redress, not because it outsources responsibility.

> It is just as easy to prove that a pro-elite-university hiring practice has a differential impact on a variety of protected classes as one that uses an IQ test, and there's probably better evidence for lots of jobs that performance is predicted by IQ test results, to overcome the presumption of disparate impact discrimination from the differential impact.

If this is true, then why haven't elite universities been successfully sued for discriminatory admissions (recently that is)?

> If this is true, then why haven't elite universities been successfully sued for discriminatory admissions (recently that is)?

Employment and educational discrimination are covered by different laws, so it's not the same question, and,

Even if the standards applied were the same, whether admissions are illegally discriminatory and whether hiring by graduation is would be very different questions.

> give an IQ test

tho it doesn't have to be an IQ test. It could be the same sort of examination a university would administer for their degrees for their field. Except the result of the test is independent from the degree, and you can take the test without having paid for a degree (you just pay for the test - or the bill is picked up by employer, or whatever arrangement the market settles on).

Normal universities in France do this (no filtering), it comes with a bunch of issues as well, notably that special schools / programs do filter and they end up being seen as more prestigious.

That's so crazy it might just work! I'm very impressed with this unorthodox idea.

> But I think these goals are different, and are now becoming so clearly differentiated they must be split apart.

I disagree, I think a demonstrable strength of the Anglo-Saxon university system is the integration of teaching and research. Look at countries especially in Europe that don't integrate and see how their universities suffer.

In my experience in an American school, most of the professors are only interested in their research and not the teaching. The ones that were only teaching because they liked it and not doing any research were much better at it.

But the relatively weak performance of for example French universities (split between teaching and research) compared to British, American or Swiss universities (unified) suggests that the outcome is not as you think.

Sure. As I said:

> and parts of this learning could be delegated to colleges specialized in specific fields

I envision these colleges being part of a university.

> why haven't universities long since given way to models like Lambda School, but for every discipline?

What could Lambda School look like at its best?

- self-directed learning under the close personal supervision of an expert tutor

- being deeply immersed amongst a group of highly motivated people learning at the same time that you can reflect off

- time and space to learn and grow and build a reputation and portfolio

- help connecting you with industry or other fields for a job when you finish

...but wait isn't this what a good college already is?

Take a look at my response to the other response to my grandparent comment.

I think the role of a university is just too large. Universities cannot do everything at once, so bloating is a concomitant effect. This bloating decreases the efficacy of the university system on all fronts.

A good college is all of what you say, but that's not what college is today (for most people who go to college, not top-tier Ivy Leagues and such). For the less fortunate, college is more of a "slog your way through four years of shitty living and disinterest to get a probably worthless piece of paper".

Lambda school exists right now. If it is successful then it will gradually start eating into college market share. It seems like mostly the system has to just wait and see for now.

One thing that it could do, I suppose, is reshape the bureaucracy to accommodate a reality of a people educated at lambda schools. There are forms asking you about your education level. Important forms. Immigration for example. Not being able to check the college box could hurt you.

If someone has gone to lambda school, and self taught in their free time, could they work as a researcher? Or is that gated behind phd admission which is gated behind a bachelors? That might need a change too.

Treating college as an extension of high school in America seems to come from the post-civil-rights era as a convenient economic weed-out of certain segments of society from even entry-level work :/

I could not agree more. Replacing classism, racism, etc with an -apparent- meritocracy helped the middle class to swallow continuing inequality: instead of keeping the poor folks out - we kept the uneducated out - forgetting the two groups overlap heavily. The number of people my age who speak of their high-end expensive education as if it was entirely merit based (“you have no idea how hard we were worked to get our Degrees!”) always irks me. The worlds best philosophers probably never had a chance to learn to write, the worlds best leaders enough to eat, etc.

As a non-college graduate who’s career is going fairly well, I can only hurry to gather as much capital as I can before a real meritocracy emerges: I am not a genius, and there are enough poor geniuses with less opportunities than me to eclipse me many times over.

Yeah all this talk like there is logic and reason that is honest. It's the way it is so the system can mostly stop people from learning, while looking like teachers. It will be endlessly discussed as though it is a natural phenomenon that is impossible to understand, when all it's for is a method of controlling those who work without choice. Simple to fix, impossible to take away from them.

Coursera is now doing entirely online degrees from real universities for a fraction of the cost. Shout out to them.

The cost and debt problems are outrageous and needs to be fixed.

But I don't understand the anti-college sentiment on HN. It's a feature that you can have no idea what you want to do at 18, start with a bio major, switch to history because you had a really good professor as a freshman, and then graduate to do something completely unrelated.

I get the impetus to see this an unimportant, but a trade-school only world is one with an even narrower elite, less scientific and historical literacy throughout the broader population, and more vulnerable to demagogues and conspiracy theories.

Finding an alternative to the social part of college is the real challenge. The transferring of knowledge is already commoditized and available freely online.

The value of university is not the education.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com