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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

From the article: Four-year degrees were designed in large part to provide a broad-based education that teaches young people to analyze and think critically, considered vital preparation to participate in the civic life of American democracy.

From the undergraduate CS adviser at a major university (Paraphrased, this was a coffee hour conversation): I've actually never had a student come to me and tell me they wanted a broad education. Even very motivated students try to fill their gen-ed requirements with stuff they expect to be useful or easy.

There is a fundamental disconnect here. College employees want to sell one product but college students wish to buy another. College admins want to keep the money flowing.

I'd love it if new entrants take over the world here, but I don't see that happening. College is not a very competitive market.

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> They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying... lobbying, to get what they want... Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want... they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that... that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right.

> They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers... Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork.

-- George Carlin

Educational institutions aren't exactly the same as businesses. For instance, how many teenagers actually WANT to attend high school? Looking back I can honestly say I learned some important things in high school (but then again, I took every AP class available to me and then some).

Colleges and universities have an interesting niche to fill. A broad-based liberal arts education isn't just a tradition - it's actually a useful tool that can help with whatever your main task is in life. I am a computer scientist by trade and by degree. My degree taught me very little I wasn't already aware of as far as computer science is concerned. The most mind blowing thing was learning Scheme, which led me to learn CL, and start looking at other functional languages. However, my degree also taught me about art (very important for a CS person IMHO), literature, history, philosophy, biology, mathematics, physics, and more... I have hobbies outside of CS mostly because of my degree. Most importantly, I can draw inspiration from other disciplines, because I understand the basics of many disciplines.

Too many people expect colleges to provide only directly relevant instructional material. This is not what college is for. If you only want to learn a specific trade, go to trade school. College isn't going to get you a job, it isn't going to feel immediately useful, especially when you are young. I had the advantage of slowly getting a degree over 8 years while working full time. It was hard, and the first few years I whined like everyone else - but then I started to see how becoming more intellectual gave me a leg up in business and in CS.

Colleges don't give the students what they want, because most of them haven't a clue what they want or need to prosper in the long term. College isn't job training.

college markets are kept uncompetitive by high barriers to entry. One is the chicken and egg problem of attracting decent professors. The other is huge subsidies to existing institutions that make the tuition costs of a start-up college uncompetitive.

college markets are kept uncompetitive by high barriers to entry.

Indeed. The United States looks bizarre to other countries because accreditation of colleges is done by associations of previously accredited colleges. You get to be in the club if the club admits you.

http://www.ed.gov/admins/finaid/accred/index.html

But the clubs make one of the requirements of membership a substantial capital expense for certain kinds of facilities, so a new market entrant has to start out with a substantial supply of cash at the beginning. For colleges tha initially have no endowment income, starting out while relying mainly on student tuition payments for revenue is quite risky.

http://www.maguireassoc.com/services/forecasting.html

What do you mean by "decent professors"? If you mean "quality teachers", then you'll have a very easy time of it. There is a huge oversupply of PhD's, and many are excellent teachers. You can get good teachers quite cheaply.

Accredition and reputation are the main barriers.

There is a huge oversupply of PhD's, and many are excellent teachers.

Agreeing with your first point that there are lots of Ph.D.s to go around to staff many colleges, how does one check your second point that a particular person is a good teacher? What is the best evidence for determining who is an effective teacher at the college level, and how is that evidence gathered at each college where Ph.D.s teach, and used at each college that has occasion to hire new faculty?

Disclaimer: most of what I'm about to say is second hand info. I'm a research postdoc, so teaching matters very little to me (all I need to do is show up). However, I know several people who did go through this process.

Current method: student evaluation. Treat it as a roughly equal mix of easiness, sympathy (1), clarity and charisma.

The best method would be to measure outcomes on standardized exams. However, in all cases I've seen, the teacher doesn't affect this very much. Very few places do this.

In practice, most teaching colleges hire mainly based on personal connections or random chance (whoever applied at the right time). So I didn't mean to imply that new entrants into the college market could do a good job of hiring teachers. Basically, they can do just as good a job as anyone else.

(1) Fun fact: my teaching evaluations went down about 40% after I stopped acting sympathetic and started writing my own tests.

"Sorry the test is so hard, I didn't write it. I'll try to help you pass it and see what I can do about a curve." -> good evaluations.

"Stop whining, i'll curve it if it's too hard. And yes, I do expect you to understand the concepts rather than just do mindless calculations." -> bad evaluations.

I could probably try harder to game the system, but I don't really want an academic job anymore.

you could control the standardized tests for IQ, which would cancel out noise. The problem is that you now need to administer two tests, and the errors implicit in assigning raw numbers to such fuzzy concepts as teaching ability multiply.

My experience is that not every PhD obtained one to become a teacher. In fact, most of them teach due to the requirements of the university (during their almost-PhD years), as opposed to any burning desire to shape the next generation.

There are over 4000 colleges and universities in the U.S, ranging from low cost community colleges to very expensive private schools. That's a lot of options for people looking for an education. New schools are still started, although not as often as before, and they are usually public schools. Still, to claim that the college market is uncompetitive makes no sense.

to claim that the college market is uncompetitive makes no sense.

You've convinced me that to claim that the college market doesn't have a lot of participants makes no sense. But I don't think anyone was making that claim here. What would be good evidence that a college that wants to do something new and different (e.g., offer a three-year accredited degree at lower cost than a four-year degree) is in a strong competitive position in the current market? How do colleges compete one against another?

they compete by giving their students access to better jobs or academic positions than they would have had by attending a different school. college is a prestige and credentials game.

How do colleges compete one against another?

They compete for new students / the parents of said students. The problem is even with all that competition schools don't grow and quickly grow and take over the market so students end up competing for them. Which is why schools focus on looking good from the outside and not really innovating in education.

They compete for students. They compete for professors (both those who will attract students and those who will attract grant money). They compete for peer recognition.

If colleges believe they can offer a 3 year degree that will result in students who are able to compete against students with a 4 year degree, they will do so. And, to be honest, a couple will probably try.

The format of higher education in America has been evolving for close to 400 years. During that time, many ideas have been tested, and you can still find a few colleges that are very different than the norm. However, the vast majority look similar in terms of how degrees are structured because that is what was found to be the most effective in preparing students for a career after they graduate.

You can argue over whether or not whether the traditional methods are best, but at the end of the day they work for the majority of students here. And, of course, the quality of higher education in America is high enough to attract people from all over the world.

At the end of the day, you don't have to take my word for it - just look into some of the research that's been done, both in terms of curriculum and general student development, and you'll get an idea as to just how much time is being put into determining the best ways to help students learn and grow.

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