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Comment by iamdave | Hacker News Reader

Feel free to take this at face value, but this somewhat concerns me. I attended community college for one semester before transferring to a state uni where tuition was almost 20,000 dollars more and in my experience the characteristic and personal motivation was much different. At the community college (where students often did not have to pay tuition at all because of the low cost bundled with state provided financial support) students seemed apathetic about attending class, and personal success whereas the students at the state uni (who faced the prospect of having to pay thousands in student loans) this was the complete opposite.

Students had a higher degree of personal commitment, and motivation to succeed at the uni level. Who knows if this will be the case at MIT, but this is just what I happened to experience when the disparity of income became as overt as it did

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Why is it good for kids to be motivated by the fact that they're paying a lot of money? People should be in school if they're motivated by their desire to learn, or they should just get out and stop diluting the experience for everyone else.

Our society doesn't do a good job of serving kids who just want job training and don't have an academic bent. Right now we lump together the people who want vocational training and a certificate of competency with the people who are passionate and want to learn. This leads to a mixed weird situation where too much irrelevant stuff is "taught"[1] from the perspective of the vocational students, and the course work is largely busy work from the perspective of those who want to learn.

That "Mathematician's Lament" that appeared on here recently is a great exposition on this problem. http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

1. I use the word "taught" loosely here to refer to the process of memorization and regurgitation that is standard in the formal education system.

/upvote for caring about the source of motivation

I downvoted this because I've seen three "/*vote" comments from you just today and they're starting to get annoying. What's the point of the "/" again?

My votes don't count, so I write them in comments. Feel free to complain to pg.

the / is like an irc command or various other places.

PS your profile says to email you but doesn't give an email address.

what's the point of Paul Graham taking away voting rights and refusing to give them back?

i don't know the whole story of pg taking away your voting rights, but as a guess, i'd say he did so because he felt you were abusing the privilege.

so now, rather than getting the message and being cool about it, you and curi are incessantly belly-aching instead.

in pg's place, i'd be thinking it's about time to ban both of you altogether.

wow, that's some amazing deference to authority. you don't know what happened, but assume if someone gets in trouble they must have deserved it.

>i'd say he did so because he felt you were abusing the privilege.

I still don't think giving NSX2 20 upvotes was a very big deal. After Paul told me to stop, I did, then he took away my voting rights three days later. He didn't like my reply to his nasty email telling me to stop upvoting. My reply was "Sometimes you take yourself too seriously." Paul interpreted this as a "Fuck you." Which it really wasn't, though in the context of the email he sent me, I could see why anything other than "Yes sir, I'm sorry" could be interpreted as "fuck you." He has since ignored my attempts to apologize.

I don't get it . . . were you playing around with the voting mechanism and you figured out how to give someone multiple upvotes for one item? Otherwise, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

voting up someone's comment history.

Man, I sound bitter. I should clarify that I also think a lot more people would be interested to learn if the material was presented in an interesting way. As Lockhart points out, school somehow has a way of taking all of the life out of the subject. This alienates a lot of people who could otherwise really take an interest in the subject and pursue it for its own sake.

This definitely happened to me with math. I liked math as a kid and enjoyed it, but in HS and college math just became total monotony and boredom. I'm now taking time to study some of it on my own and getting a lot more out of it, as I actually understand and appreciate what I'm reading.

I live in Germany, where college, with a very few exceptions is free across the board. On the one hand that's wonderful and part of me wants to love a system that offers free educational access to all. On the other hand, you see the influence of a value economy on it: there's little motivation to finish for those who enjoy it. I think there's a sweet spot in the middle where people pay just enough to assign value to a semester of schooling, but not so much that they're crippled by debt upon graduation. In an ideal world, for me, tuition costs should be for engendering value rather than recuperating costs.

students seemed apathetic about attending class and personal success

For what it's worth, students like this get weeded out of MIT rather quickly.

Aye, I don't know how they work things there but that's at least good to know. It's more beneficial to the organization to weed them out and let them find success than to not care and bring everyone around them down.

Thanks for that tidbit.

I dropped out from college after a successful year because I understood I was losing my time. If I had gotten in debt to pay an expensive tuition, I would have pursued the studies for the wrong reasons, just to rationalize the insane expenses and to get that piece of paper. Thank god I was free to drop out and do something else.

On a side note, a lot of psychological studies as well as common sense suggest that people wherever they are and whatever they do are less motivated if they don't get consideration. No wonder why the students that have the perspective of a Harvard or MIT diploma are much more motivated than those who attend to community college.

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