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Comment by jackpirate | Hacker News Reader

One possible cause not mentioned in the article is that universities offer/require more filler courses. Last year, for example, I had to teach an intro to HTML course at a UC school. This is a required course for all non-engineering majors. To get an A, all you have to do is create a single html webpage using 10 different tags and 10 different css styles.[1] These courses are huge money makers for the university. I had 120 students in the lecture, and each student paid about $1000 to take that course. The course was a joke for 90% of the students, but they didn't care because they got their "easy A". In exchange, the university got a butt ton of cash.

[1] This grading system was set by the department so that there wouldn't be "easy" and "hard" quarters to take the course.

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Yeah, Murray Sperber called it the “faculty-student non-aggression pact" - “Professors don’t ask much of their students and students don’t ask much of their professors".

And a newer book called "Academically Adrift" found that students aren't learning much in college.

How do they get away with all this? One explanation is the signaling theory of education. A degree (and the prestige/selectivity/reputation of the school and program) is a proxy (signal) for IQ plus an indicator of persistence (toughing it out to make it through a degree program).

EconTalk has a great episode on this.

"ryan Caplan of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog talks to EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the value of a college education. Caplan argues that the extra amount that college graduates earn relative to high school graduates is misleading as a guide for attending college--it ignores the fact that a sizable number of students don't graduate and never earn that extra money. Caplan argues that the monetary benefits of a college education have a large signaling component rather than representing the value of the knowledge that's learned. Caplan closes by arguing that the subsidies to education should be reduced rather than increased."

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...

I think that's a completely different issue. In my experience, in the "real" cs courses, professors and students expect quite a bit from each other. It's just these filler classes that noone expects anything from each other because everyone knows they're a joke.

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