Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

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Things also "work" if you are able to scale down a cost (employment of human labor such as teachers and counselors) while maintaining or scaling up a source of revenue (student enrollment.)

I worked for a company that offered this service (among other data-y things.) It employed lots of bright-eyed young people who were extremely happy they had found a tech job where they could do good, helping struggling students succeed at college. It was a dream job. However, the information we heard trickling in from the customers (public universities and community colleges) was pretty demotivational. They ones that were shrinking were panicked about their future existence, and the ones that were growing were basically like, yeah, hiring a proportional number of front-line staff to interact with students like in the past would just be silly. Nobody is going to do that. Run along, idealistic tech people, save these poor kids with analytics and text messages, because we're not paying to do it the old-fashioned way.

This really gets at the heart of why I have very little allegiance and essentially no desire to donate to my alma mater: Why would I care about or donate to a business that really doesn't care about me individually besides $$$ signs? Sure, I patronized them for four years of my life, but I've done the same with In & Out for longer and you don't see me sending them a check for nothing. Much like In & Out, the positive memories of my alma mater were more so about the people I was with than the location or business proposition itself. Ok, I'm ending this metaphor before it becomes too contrived...

Realistically you donate so that the school has a bigger budget and more opportunity to gain prestige making your diploma more valuable. That's really only relevant to a small subset of the population and rapidly shrinking. Four decades ago degrees had meaning but now they are largely participation trophies that come at great expense.

Better to donate to Khan Academy. Can even enjoy an In N Out burger while doing so.

Khan academy is absolutely fantastic. However, it's only a step above giving students free textbooks or other self-learning resources: It mostly work for students that are already self-motivating. This tends to be a minority of students, and most require some degree of a human support network to succeed.

Things also "work" if you are able to scale down a cost (employment of human labor such as teachers and counselors) while maintaining or scaling up a source of revenue (student enrollment.)

This is an unfortunate truth. Schools grow, don't scale human labor to accommodate additional students, overall student performance & dropouts increase, and their answer is to recruit more students in a downward spiral. Never mind the fact that it costs more money to do this than simply hiring 2 or 3 more advisors to do real human outreach. I saw this cycle over the course of 4 or 5 years where I work. After providing hard analysis of this pattern each year, I, working with colleagues on the academic side of things, managed to push for those advising resources and the results have more than paid for it.

The problem is that many of the idealistic tech people are only looking at the problem from the tech point of view. I have resisted efforts over the years to assimilate me into a central IT division because the viewpoint I get through being embedded in an operational division strongly informs my analytical efforts. I see the business cycle, I talk to advisors, I construct & analyze surveys that mix quantitative and qualitative factors-- there is no detail of the student experience that is too small for me to ignore. It hammers home the point that analysis & tech can only help focus the efforts of human labor, not replace it.

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