Comment by araes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by araes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I generally think Bill Gates is a clever man. I also think his heart is normally in the right place these days. That said, I think he, and most of education reform seems to often focus on the externalities of education, rather than the core, the student.

I agree that better data reporting, with focuses on goals and outcomes, much as has been done in the Aid sector, could help. I also think that having a better education environment, in the form of good advising for support, and broader class type / learning options, may help students complete school once they're there.

However, in a tie-back to the earlier article [1] on the disconnect between boss / worker expectations, I think we also need a much earlier focus on individual achievement and learning. On setting goals, and then largely giving students freedom in how they approach and attack those goals. That is what college students need to be successful, and that is what the job sector identifies as the signal of good, high performing workers.

Many of the students that we send to college are not mentally ready to be successful at college. In fact, many go without any clear idea of why they're going, besides the advertised 4+ year party, or family saying "go". In many ways, I don't think that's their fault. Part of it is, for not taking charge of their lives, but for many, college is one of the first times where you seriously have to set your own goals. High school teachers took care of it, parents took care of it. We need to remedy that by providing more, low-risk opportunities for them to develop those skills while they still can work with a net.

As a corollary, I also don't think we should make it easier for students who aren't ready to attend. It does a disservice to them, and due to the way our current college loan system is set up, it often ends up burying them for the rest of their lives under non-transferable debt. (often times at the scale of a low-end house) For those who it didn't, many times we get C to D folks out the other end, who muddled by, and drift on to something. Maybe the act of attending enriches them, and ultimately makes them better people, but for a lot, I feel like higher education has become an expensive trap that we're not properly preparing them for.

[1] http://www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?did=4...

Among "white collar professionals" we have started a shift from a pedigree-based workforce to a vocational skills-based workforce. Tech is a leader here - if you can write code, you can make a living, even if you dropped out of 3rd grade. Most institutions of higher learning are unable, or unwilling to adapt to this new reality. What's the point of sending more students to schools that don't know how to prepare them for the new realities of the world they live in?

The british, and maybe other countries, have the concept of a 'Gap year' where it is acceptable to take a year between high school and college for the purpose of travel and community service. This can alleviate the problem of "not being ready".

I would love that to be the custom in the US. Get a job, even a menial one. Live on your own. Develop an intrinsic goal of why you want to go to college.

Cost of attendance rises slightly every year (say 3%). Delaying college means you come in later in the appreciation cycle; your total cost is substantially higher.

Gap years are, unfortunately, a privilege for students who are so wealthy that doesn't matter or so poor that they're on full rides anyway. For a middle class student, it's just throwing away money.

"For a middle class student, it's just throwing away money."

They cost money, but that's not the same as throwing money away. It depends on what you're getting in exchange. If the gap year serves its purpose of helping you figure out what you want to do, the delta in cost is substantially less than paying a few years of tuition while you figure out the same thing.

Acceptability varies. When looking at mathematics courses I was told taking a gap year would be frowned upon.

Same here; I would lose eligibility for several (all?) of my scholarships by taking a year off, without which I could not have attended the college I went to (or maybe any college).

On the other hand, for Engineering some Cambridge colleges positively encourage deferred entry; no College discourages it [1].

[1] http://www3.eng.cam.ac.uk/admissions/guide/otherfactors.html

> Many of the students that we send to college are not mentally ready to be successful at college.

> On setting goals, and then largely giving students freedom in how they approach and attack those goals.

I don't think this even happens in many colleges. Paradoxically, at the better resourced universities, the student has enough advisors and guidance that they're often simply walked through their degree program without too much decision making on the student's part.

I'm reminded of a friend of mine who went to a very nice private school and got her B.A., started her career and decided to go to school for her M.S. Except she went to the local state commuter university while she was working and simply couldn't figure out how to navigate a system where the student was expected to figure out everything from their prerequesites to planning their class load and specialization - advisors were rare and hard to get a hold of.

She was simply overwhelmed by all this and really had lots of second thoughts about staying at the school. We talked about it and I asked her what he experience had been like at her undergrad. She said from day 1 she had basically always had an advisor of some sort to call upon to help her set her schedule and priorities, make sure degree requirements were being met, etc. And the advisor:student ratio was some ridiculously low number. I told her that at regular 'ol state school, you have to buck up a bit and fend for yourself. It means you have to do extra work to figure things out, but you also can get more flexibility for your degree goals.

She ended up sticking it out, but I was kind of surprised at the struggle since I had just taken the lack of guidance for granted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com