Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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Damnit! He stole my idea!

When I was in undergrad, I had a bunch of conversations with my friends about just why we were in college. It all came down to three things:

1. We wanted to show potential employers that we were smart enough to get into an elite private college.

2. We wanted to show potential employers that we were docile and persistent enough to continue attending said elite private college, even though we had accomplished #1.

3. We wanted to get to know lots of other people who were willing to pay $40K/year for the privilege of #1 and #2.

Of course, once you get out in the working world and actually get involved in hiring decisions, you quickly learn that there's not that much difference in the quality of education at various universities. Harvard's classroom instruction is not much better than any other top-tier college, and may actually be worse. MIT's is probably better, but it's nothing that a couple of guys from UVA (ahem, Reddit) can't pick up in their spare time.

Instead, you look at the Education section on a resume because people have already done the hard work for you. Someone at Harvard painstakingly went through 18 years of that candidate's life and decided that they were good enough for Harvard. I've got code to write: I don't have time to spend digging through a candidate's background. If it's good enough for Harvard, it's good enough for me.

So, the business idea I came up with was a simple certification program. We'd look at all your test scores, administer a few additional tests, have you complete a project or two, talk to previous people you've worked with, and generally decide if you're worthy or not. We'd set the bar high enough that the average Harvard or MIT grad would fail. And if you pass, we give you a college degree - all without having to put up with the bullshit aspects, like going to classes or forking over a couple hundred dollars. You're responsible for your own education, we just say whether you've educated yourself.

I wonder if I should've put this down under "other ideas" on my yCombinator app.

Good luck getting that degree accredited.[0] You've entirely elided the fundamental aspect of education: education. A college degree is not supposed to just be a certification that you are competent over a certain domain of facts, but rather an indication that you have spent 3-4 years thinking, applying yourself, and growing intellectually.

While autodidactism is certainly laudable, there is value in a corporate educational setting, namely the value of intellectual interaction. College is not so much about learning a set of data, but learning how to learn. (For the ultimate example, consider the Ph.D., a degree meant only to teach you to do research, and requiring legitimate research to attain it.)

Now, I'll admit, I was educated in a liberal arts[1] high school, and am currently pursuing a couple of liberal arts degrees. That is both why and because I believe education is about thinking, not committing facts to memory. I eschew academic engineering because it is (at my university, at least) primarily a series of courses that certify your knowledge of yet another parcel of facts. That is useless, educationally. As technical training,[2] great, but it's not education.

Your list of "why"s implies that, substantively, you were no different at the end of college than at the beginning, modulo a group of friends, and four years aging. If that is the case, I'm terribly sorry; you managed to miss most of your education.

[0] Mea culpa: this entire comment is a bit hot-headed. You've hit a pet peeve. [1] Before you jump to conclusions: the liberal arts include the hard sciences. [2] In all honesty, that's what engineering school is: a vocational education in an incredibly advanced vocation. (That's not a problem, really: I share my time between my liberal arts degrees and a fine arts program, which is also vocational education, in a (imho) advanced vocation.)

"College is not so much about learning a set of data, but learning how to learn."

I've heard that a lot. My high school was basically founded around that premise, and I completely bought into it then. IMNSHO now, it's complete bullshit.

You don't learn how to learn by having someone teach you. You learn how to learn by butting your head up against a problem, reading everything you can about what other people have already done on the problem, trying different approaches until one works, and moving on to the next problem. After you've repeated this a few hundred times, you start figuring out which approaches are likely to work and which aren't.

The Ph.D is a good example. There are plenty of people that are "ABD" (All But Dissertation) - they've gone through all the coursework, been taught all that their instructors can teach them, but nobody considers them "real" Ph.Ds. Why? Because the meat of a Ph.D program is actually going out and doing original research, and someone who hasn't done the research doesn't really know how to do the research.

The point of a certification program is to decouple the act of learning from the act of judging how much has been learned. Right now, universities perform both functions, which in any other industry would be a ludicrous conflict of interest. And so we get grade inflation and colleges refusing to admit poorer students because it'll drop their U.S. News rankings.

If you look up the words education and training you will see that there are differences in definition but that all college programs contain aspects of both education and training. You are creating a false dichotomy. I can only speak of the effect an ABET engineering program had on me: it changed the way my mind works on a fundamental level. Good education of any variety tends to have that effect.

I'm waxing originalistic, but I'll spare you the argument from Latin (the relevant verb is educare), and just skip to the OED. To educate is "3. To train (any person) so as to develop the intellectual and moral powers generally." The distinction I draw is between "develop[ing] the intellectual and moral powers generally" and training a particular skill, without respect to overall intellect.

(Also note, I'm not saying that there is no such thing as an engineering education, only that many engineering programs suck at developing the mind generally. I'd still maintain that there's a fundamental difference between engineering and liberal art/science education, but that is not a discussion for this thread.)

The same vague generalizations could be made about any poorly implemented program of education.

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