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Comment by wunderland | Hacker News Reader

All of this debate about what measures should be used to gatekeep higher education ignore that the US system is only loosely about teaching students; the goal of an American university degree is class differentiation.

There is not a shortage of textbooks or qualified teachers who could explain calculus or history or economics. As a society, the could easily produce far more educated people (and for a lower cost), but that is not the goal of a degree. The diploma -- especially from an elite school like Columbia -- first and foremost is a signifier that you deserve entrance into an upper middle managerial class. Unless the goals of higher education are teaching (or god forbid actual job training), the entrance requirements will always be arbitrary enough that class lines can be sufficiently preserved.

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I feel the same way. Imagine if Harvard had the ability to enroll one billion students per year. There would be no need to use either grades, SAT score, personal essays or anything else to reject students. They would be able to accept everybody, and then everybody could get an elite education and society would be so much better off.

But that would never happen. The whole point of ivy league is that they are exclusive. Companies get to feel special when they hire an ivy league grad so they can feel special for having one of the special chosen ones. If everyone gets to have an ivy league degree, then the ivy league degree becomes worthless.

The ivy leagues combined are half a percent of college students. They are not representative of the system as a whole.

>There is not a shortage of textbooks or qualified teachers who could explain calculus or history or economics.

There is shortage of skilled teachers, especially in CS.

People go to the industry cuz pay sucks.

In a loose sense this is the accepted purpose of a degree, not just as an education center (theoretically motivated peers in addition to the teachers), but as a stamp of "we have given you education in X and deemed that you learned/retained enough of it". I don't know that many school do it well, but some universities can claim that they have much more rigorous programs than others and so students going there will come out better educated (I studied abroad and the mathematics standards at my host school were just nonexistent).

Anyone can pick up a math book and start teaching themselves, there's no doubt about it - but any form of third-party verification of this is very high effort on a case-by-case basis.

> The diploma -- especially from an elite school like Columbia -- [is] first and foremost is a signifier that you deserve entrance into an upper middle managerial class

I think that while this take is largely accurate, it's incomplete. Substitute "upper middle managerial class" with "enlarged access to professional employment" -- not a huge leap -- and you can see societal benefit for aggressively modulating the gatekeeping for inclusivity's sake.

Otherwise it's just the usual cynicism which is always effective for maintaining the status quo.

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