Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

I think we shall see a break between the desire for universal education, the public good of strong research and the pandering to powerful middle class votes.

100 years ago universal education ended between 12 and 14 years old and only the rich or the brilliant went on to further education. Now we are heading to a situation where further education is seen as the minimum universal education. (Something like 50 % of students are expected to attend college)

this effectively reduces most colleges and courses to an extended High School, with the expected ROI of the same.

whereas as a society we want to have only the most brilliant and motivated working on pushing out boundaries of knowledge - basically please invent the future for us.

and this will lead to two tier colleges - one that act as schools and one that act as universities.

we cannot allow the universities to be contaminated by rich idiots, or pushing research out with floods of high schoolers

so ... we should look to soviet Russia - who simply took the best minds and put them in college. publically funded, strict entrance criteria.

everyone else - publically funded colleges that manage to push the ROI down to zero.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here and say we shouldn't become more like Soviet Russia.

The goal should be improving our schools for everyone not conceding this is the best we can do and only let in the gifted few who meet our "requirements".

Would Steve Jobs have been allowed to drop in on Calligraphy classes in Soviet Russia? I doubt it.

The point being when you build a great system and give people the ability to explore it you arrive at much more creative outcomes which therefore provide much better growth potential to the overall economy then a "fit into a specific box we already created for you" approach.

Would Steve Jobs have been allowed to drop in on Calligraphy classes in Soviet Russia?

Steve jobs quit college...[==$$$ reasons]

[Under a system of free college, he would not have been forced out. That's a relevant datapoint. Just sayin.]

You don't seem to take in account the reality when comparing today's education with the one of the last century. In the last century there was a strong need for manual labor, now - not so much. There is a reason, you see, why people throng the higher education today, and why the education's gatekeepers confidently tax them for the way in.

" we should look to soviet Russia"

I don't know, the children of our nomenklatura do pretty well already.

I also don't think that your picture of 100 years ago is quite on the mark. Good solid students who were not neither brilliant nor rich (by the common understanding of the word) did manage to get degrees.

As long as they weren't Jewish or other unpopular ethnicities.

this will lead to two tier colleges - one that act as schools and one that act as universities

That already pretty much exists. Strictly speaking I think the dividing line is whether or not you can get a PhD at the school in question; in casual speech, "university" vs. "college" sometimes approximates the distinction.

Correct, it does already exist and it's even more diverse than you indicate. Community colleges (2-year), state colleges, private colleges, state universities, and private universities. All on a continuum, with a fair bit of overlap between categories.

I'm sure everybody that attended a top school has a story about the rich flunky down the hall, but it's still the exception, not the rule.

There are also some hybrids along that continuum: for instance, private universities that receive partial state funding.

Note that some "colleges" can provide an arguably superior education than some lower-end public universities because professors are chosen and paid for their teaching ability rather than their research.

You don't even need to hedge that much.

Quite a few non-PhD granting colleges offer superior education (not even arguably superior, just superior) than all but the highest tier research universities, public or private.

I won't pick too many examples lest this gets bogged down haggling over details, but basically, Swarthmore.

> pandering to powerful middle class votes.

Don't you think that problem will take care of itself as the overpricing of a college education reduces the size of the middle class?

>pandering to powerful middle class votes.

All government policies on both sides for decades has been designed around the intentional, orderly destruction of that group. So basing a business model on a group the government is trying its best to destroy is not going to work out well.

>Something like 50 % of students are expected to attend college

More like 100%, if we're merely talking about expectations. A third or so graduate, and about a tenth or less have a job actually benefiting from the skills taught, aside from supply and demand credentialism.

Most likely future appears to be rather than emulating the rich and brilliant by going to school, thus the middle classes send their kids there to try and become rich and powerful, we as a culture will just find another "rich and powerful" thing for our non-rich and non-powerful to try to emulate. Perhaps evangelical religion, or ownership of smartphones, or living in a fashionable neighborhood (SV?) or some paid social media "friends" or something like that. I think it highly unlikely that shifting social trends merely result in fine tuning of a bubble. Think of womens high fashion clothing... that never varies in minor shifts of the exact tone of mauve, but dramatic changes in type, shape, color, and texture. Its very unlikely that a giant bubble/fad will pop with mere minor tinkering.

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