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Comment by mljoe | Hacker News Reader

University is ripe for disruption. Not only has the prices spiraled out of control, no time in history has good quality information has been more available on the Internet. When I was in school, when YouTube was new, I would watch well crafted lectures from top tier professors for free. This allowed me to get a better handle on my brick and mortar class. The problem is the career value of a degree has not diminished, it's a bit of a network effect really. Maybe people can get hired from Coursera certificates, I would certainly consider it if I was a hiring manager.

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> The problem is the career value of a degree has not diminished, it's a bit of a network effect really. Maybe people can get hired from Coursera certificates, I would certainly consider it if I was a hiring manager.

A university degree tells me three things a Coursera certificate doesn't:

1. A graduate have more breadth and depth in a given major. Standford's CS course includes math, physics, engineering, programming theory, data structures, algorithms, etc. (Just picked Stanford's program at random, not advocating they're perfect)

2. A graduate has exposure to multiple topics/subjects, and hopefully has some critical thinking skills. A Coursera cert doesn't do that.

3. Somebody graded them. It wasn't some massive online system.

Maybe other people don't care about these things, but as a former manager, I've found these qualities produce a better well rounded individual in the workplace. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but that's my experience.

To your point: All these things can be replaced, but I'd argue micro-degrees don't do that.

I do hope this is solved: The price is crazy.

[1] http://csmajor.stanford.edu/Requirements.shtml

I can't argue with #3 - some MOOC graders are particularly terrible, too.

However, there's nothing to stop a person studying just as many topics/subjects online, and to cover them in about as much depth.

I agree. However, there's not a good way to compare apples to apples like there is with a university education. Maybe that's the next step: having these MOOCs come up with some competing standards...

Yes and no. Many of the MOOCs provided by the likes of MIT, Stanford, Berkley, etc, are not watered down. For lesser known providers the quality of content is less certain.

I think a standard in terms of grading would be a huge win.

I studied mathematics with the Open University in the UK, what I found is graduates of traditional universities frequently find ways to disparage the OU despite it having a rigorous curriculum and requiring a great deal of effort and discipline from its students.

I'm not saying that is what you are doing but it does seem to have hints of it.

Yes and no. The lecture part can certainly be disrupted, but the most successful learning experiences I had in university were during face-to-face problem solving sessions with other classmates, small group discussion, and participating in a community of learners of a shared subject. There's also the challenges of learning that occurs through labs and other manipulation of the physical world that is hard to replicate online. I think you could see significant disruption in the lower-division, large-lecture classes, but upper-division classes, hands-on labs and small-group discussions and seminars will continue to benefit from physical proximity.

Maybe you could set up a cheap hybrid - get students together in one place to work together on MOOCs, and have some strict admission standards to ensure that the students are high quality. This would be a draw to high quality students, and help replace some of the signaling value of elite schools.

Yeah, nothing that was listed would be difficult to replicate at high scale and high quality

I agree with you 100%, but MOOCs aren't necessarily the only option for educational innovation. The idea of Minerva (students still live together, but the university moves around the world) sounds interesting to me, even though it is not at all less expensive. These sort of things were never technically possible until well after the university system became entrenched. Another option is internships or entrepreneurship, what the Thiel Fellowship encourages. Chris Olah is a employee of special note at Google Brain. He never finished college, and he had the smart idea to basically reinvent scientific publishing.

> the most successful learning experiences I had in university were during face-to-face problem solving sessions with other classmates, small group discussion, and participating in a community of learners of a shared subject.

Paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to associate with others doing the same seems odd.

Physical proximity doesn't need to be as expensive as it is, so there's still room for disruption.

Think about how University education should compare to high school education, in terms of costs. High school costs about $12k per student-year [0], which includes about 1200 hours of staff time [1].

My entire 4-year undergraduate course had less than 2000 hours of staff time, which was about half large lectures and half labs and tutorials. The lectures were always larger classes than high school, and the tutes and labs were about the same size, and mostly taught by later-year students who were paid less than high school teachers.

Facilities-wise, classrooms are classrooms, toilets are toilets, and offices are offices. I can't see any reason why university buildings should be more expensive than high school buildings, for a given number of students. Besides, high school capital outlay is less than 10% of total [0]. Universities can also have classes later in the day and at night, and so get more use out of the buildings.

Then there's equipment, particularly in the labs. The university had significantly more lab equipment than high school. However, there were also significantly more students using it. This wouldn't increase the cost of computer science, maths, business, etc, but might add to the costs of physics, chemistry, engineering. I'd need to see a real cost-breakdown to believe it would be much more expensive.

It should be possible to provide a similar level of education as current universities for less than $5k per year. That's disruption.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 [1] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp

I agree, but not in the way you mentioned. Universities ARE ripe for disruption, even physically. What else do you spend 40k a year on with no guarantees, warranties, insurances, etc? It is possible to attend college and come out no better than someone who didn't(with poor planning or unfortunate swings). If I had the money, I'd open my own university. Pay nothing, live for free. But pay 5% of your income after graduation back to the university, up to some cap(or, perhaps for life). And pay nothing if you make less than X dollars per year. It may sound like and perhaps even be a pipe dream, but the fact is, universities are terribly mismanaged. Just where is all this money going, anyhow? Do we really need fancy facilities, boards and directors making way too much money, etc?

We have been saying this (and trying to do this) since the 90s, sadly.

Education economics is messed up. Where else does one pay lots and lots of money for something that is essentially freely available?

didn't many try with MOOCs? The problem is two fold - university has an acreditation/reputation aspect and a learning aspect. MOOCs and other online resources "fix" the learning aspect, but does nothing for the acreditation/reputation. Unfortunately, most employers are actually using the acreditation aspect rather than the learning aspect as the filter (given that so many people are still so incompetent in high positions).

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