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Comment by gmarx | Hacker News Reader

You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests.

I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top universities do a better job of this. From that perspective I think the main advantage of the sorting is that it is easier to teach if your students fall into a narrow band of ability

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It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one:

You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework.

I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.

very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment.

I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.

HackerNews is selection bias central. I suspect the overwhelming majority of college students don't even know the term "problem set" :) Most of it is, read this book of literature and write something showing you both read it and have absorbed the latest fads in college politics and art criticism.

I wonder about that point though, although professors also pursue the universities with more prestige, did they really spend the time to acquire the title of professor for prestige?

I think a decentralized system prioritizes the professor over the administration. In fact if universities aren't meant to be areas of teaching then why have them? My approach is more cutting out that middleman which is the university.

Moreover, prestige of unis are gradually fading away, although rare, I can sort of see a future where university credentials dont matter.

Excuse my bad grammar, I write very fast and in between my work so I dont really proofread.

I think they pursue the title of professor for 2 reasons: 1) For an intellectual there is no more awesome job/life than living among and working with other such people 2) Anything below full professor and you need to find another job in 7 years

Also, university is essentially 4 years of full-time studying you can do. Spending 4 years "unemployed" while taking online courses/building your own projects/whatever would very likely look odd to potential employers (compared to a more "traditional" path).

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