Universities and Economic Growth | Hacker News Reader

Universities and Economic Growth

philip.greenspun.com

53 pointsnopinsight24 comments

Not really sure what to make of the article. Some anecdotal evidence of some book smart but not people smart interns. And attacking the very purpose of a university education. The author romanticizes the work office far too much. And while most people go to university to get a cushy office job some things (education) will never make sense in the office.

I've gone to company trainings and the curriculum and atmosphere is more like the university lecture hall than an office. Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever? His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Highschools are great for this type of thing. The bar is particularly low. And once you've met it you never have to go back again. Colleges aren't designed that way. You go because you are looking for a detailed answer. And you are capable of understanding the answer.

And I know for a fact that professors have no qualms about F's.

"His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education."

I don't mean to put words in Philip's mouth, especially ones that are very controversial, but having read him for the last ten years I think he realizes this and the reason he proposes these changes is that he thinks it's the best you can do, given that most Ivy League professors are extremely stupid and bad at their jobs.

Now I'm not saying I fully agree with this, just that I'm pretty sure this is why he proposes some of the things that he does. The funny thing is that this is actually less cynical and more optimistic than what he used to say, which was that most Ivy League students were just extremely stupid. (Which is basically what he was saying around the time when Philip and Alex was published.)

He's not saying Ivy League professors are extremely stupid and bad at their jobs. He's saying they're really, really bad at teaching, because there's no incentive for them to be good at teaching. Outside of community colleges and are there any US third level institutions that value teaching over research?

I'm sure compared to him most Ivy League students are extremely stupid. Maybe he's had more contact withthe general population and he now realises what the average really looks like.

> Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever?

I agree watching Powerpoint will be boring, but it is simply a supplement to real learning in his proposed system--working on projects. Also, you can skip unedifying parts, unlike with live lectures.

> His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Not really. The current system seems more like a degree mill than his. When you can get A's and B's in many courses just by reading a few nights before exam time, that is a waste of four years. If you need to work on challenging projects while learning theory to make them work, you'll definitely learn more than just taking exams and quizzes (with occasional exercises).

I agree the low level courses aren't very interesting. But when you are teaching to a class of thousands there really isn't a better method. Project based work only works when the students are interested and can be engaged. This is what I was told the 100 levels were about anyway. Weeding out those that don't take the material serious from the ones that do. And it's very rare I've had a lecture that I couldn't skip. The professor posted the lecture online including pdfs and podcasts. Unedifying is highly subjective. A particular part of the material that might seem easy to you could be difficult for someone else. But cancelling the lecture all together won't be a solution.

I assume this depends on the subject and the teacher. Courses that I thought were going to be easy (Intro to Art History for example) turned out to demanding than they let you believe. Maybe things have gotten worse since I was in college (even though SAT scores keep going up). When I left highschool projects and labs had to be dropped due to budget constraints. (School couldn't afford the glass nor the insurance from what I heard). When I arrived at uni, a technical uni, collaborative, project assignments were a major component. The midterm and final were used to pad out your grade. I.E. if you had strong project grades and 1 bad exam grade it couldn't be used against you. And I've heard of students only showing up for only the midterm and final, but I doubt you could get away with it for engineering or the sciences.

There is a lot of pressure on professors to not give F's. Google "grade inflation" and you can read much about it.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls...

Excellent article.

Embarrassing deconstruction of Robert Shiller's lecture; few awesome findings, such as:

"Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there for most of each day."

Highly recommended reading.

corporate work spaces always bothered me this way. i don't have any trouble focusing and working on stuff. in fact, i only started using hacker news (let's face it, it's procrastination) when i started working at a company after college.

it drained my moral to see others goofying off at work, and to feel my own self tired at, say, 3, but hanging around until 5 just to blend in. you can bet when i got home i didn't want to work, whereas when i contract or work on my own projects i'll happily go play tennis at 3 and then work in the evening once i've settled down.

I stopped reading at Someone who had just finished read A Farewell to Alms would respond "If American workers aren't better educated than they were in the 1970s, why would you expect their wages to rise?" (He hyperlinked A Farewell to Alms, which is a book he wrote.)

Whether or not American workers are better educated than they were in the 1970s, economists claim that productivity has been rapidly growing over the last few decades. Growth in productivity is direct evidence of room for compensation to grow as well. Therefore if wages haven't grown we need to look elsewhere than "the workers aren't good enough to justify higher wages" for an explanation.

The fact that he doesn't know basic economic facts about productivity and wages is enough that I have no interest in listening to his explanations of how to improve wages by making workers more productive.

I don't pretend to have anything like a full explanation for why productivity and wages are not more strongly correlated. But it is worth noting that during the last boom wages remained steady but money spent by employers on workers grew at a healthy pace. Unfortunately the growth in spending mostly got sucked up by higher health care premiums, so wages remained flat.

Unless you can fix economic trends like that one, I guarantee that the correlation between wages and productivity will remain weak.

The link between education of workers and their wages is indeed probably less direct and/or strong than he makes it out to be. However, the increases in productivity you mention have to come from smart people thinking hard about how to do things more efficiently, so you could argue for more education from that standpoint. If you read the rest of the article in that light, he makes some interesting points.

As for why higher productivity hasn't translated into higher wages, I think participation in the free market meant (and means) that gains in productivity are used to lower prices rather than increase workers' wages.

I am trying to find the connection with Philip Greenspun and Gregory Clark who wrote the book in question. Are they the same person and Gregory is his pen name?

No connection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_%28economist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun

So you claim that high labour productivity is fully reflected in money spent on employees, and just not reflected in wages?

He claims that competition from low wage economies means that higher labour productivity from technology and capital won't be reflected in wages. He claims that only the competitive merits for of US labour will be reflected.

I think some Democrats are looking at US health care costs and trying to address them, in spite of attempts mostly by Republicans to derail that process.

Is it the problem that school teaches how to follow directions instead of think for ourselves? What does most of school consist of, even at the college level? Following directions. Make sure you paper is exactly 20 pages long, get the right answers to the even number math questions in the book.

Not until you emerge in the real world at age 22, do you finally get a chance to think for yourself. You lack street smarts but a lot of (questionably) valuable information on Political Science, Western Civilization, Algorithms, Data Structures and Cobol.

Most of my liberal arts education could be picked up (much cheaper) with a library card or a Kindle.

I think internships and apprenticing are a much better option.

How much did my computer science/economics/poli-sci education help me in the real world as a programmer/software developer? Not much.

On the job I Learned how to research and experiment on my own, while questioning everything (while being allowed to, without some crusty know it all prof shutting your down). Corporate culture is actually a little better for pushing the boundaries than academia.

Funny. There's a whole load of code out there that could've done with being created by someone who'd taken a data structures and algorithms class or two. I wouldn't exactly classify that as questionably valuable.

And, really, I don't understand university education being classified as following directions. It's far more self directed than earlier education, and indeed the jobs that follow education - unless my experience was massively atypical.

Why do the classes you take in college HAVE to help you with your work programming? Can't you just take something because you're intellectually interested in it? Or because it has an awesome teacher, or a lecturer who is world famous, or a Nobel laureate teaching it?

As long as you're genuinely interested in what you're taking there's no reason not to take it. Not everything is about learning how to do one job that you're stuck with for the rest of your life.

A student who has learned nothing will not receive an F because the professor doesn't want to admit that his teaching hasn't been compelling and/or effective.

That's not true. Professors would love to fail more students. But if you do, then you tons and tons of complaints, the university gets on your ass, and then you have to go back and change a few Fs to Ds. It's not worth the headache.

The biggest lesson I have learned was that if you fail people, you should make sure that those who fail correctly reflects the demographics (e.g. black people, women). Otherwise it is a fuck-up with some very nasty complaints.

And the problem is that at the university I teach at, being an ethnic minority is worth 20 pts of the 100 pts necessary for admission; the same number of points as a full grade point average. That means that the black students did a full grade point worse in high school, on average, than the white students they're competing with. I fudge this by grading my black students easier than my white students on essays/exams.

(based on the assumption that they score the same in other areas. That assumption is obviously not true, but the other areas where they might differ have such small point values it's close enough.)

Wait, so you compensate for group X getting in more easily by giving them an easier ride too? Is that not backwards?

I think whoever you work for ought to invest in some sort of double-blind marking system...

Why would they want a double-blind marking system?

It looks bad if you admit a bunch of black students and then fail a large number of them.

I've read several articles like this lately, and they've all ignored the elephant in the room, which is this:

Professors hate teaching.

The best-respected professors in a university manage large research projects, occasionally doing some research themselves. No-one becomes a professor to teach - if they wanted to teach, they'd have left after their degree and gone to a high school. The way that we select professors works to further this - no-one got tenure at a 'good' university without a strong research record. And since the competition is so fierce, research becomes your only focus.

It may be the case that smaller universities, or less-prestigious colleges, can give tenure to university-teachers. But as far as I can see within the system, teaching is considered a second-rate activity for second-rate minds. Given that, no professor who is considered excellent will try very hard to teach, and students' education will suffer.

"a genetic personal tendency towards future-mindedness"

That explanation seems very weak. And what about the difference in productivity between English and American weavers - also genetic? That seems very unlikely. Or maybe some other factor besides having access to the same kind of machines... Perhaps something was killing the motivation of the less productive workers (ie working harder might not have paid off for them).

Blah blah blah... he can harp on the lecture system all he wants, but at the end of the day you need a couple things for "success": 1) a motivated student, 2) an interested, accessible instructor.

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