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Comment by _Codemonkeyism | Hacker News Reader

With companies no longer requesting university degrees, online learning (like watching Harvard courses) becoming more popular and in some countries university being outragous expensive, the future of universities is bleak because people will stop going there. And that of acadamics teaching is even worse.

The internet will cut all middleman, and teachers being the middleman between you and knowledge, or gatekeepers to degrees. If people do not add value - and empty classrooms show many teachers do not add value, in my theoretical CS and math classes professors only wrote proofs on the blackboard for 1.5h and then left - the internet elimates you.

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University degrees are a form of social signaling. It's a status symbol. I've met many self-taught developers with liberal arts degree from top ranked schools. I have no doubt their degrees helped them get their foot in the door and job hop and advance in their career.

True, but the 'credentialing' is becoming less and less valuable, ie. more credentialing is needed. I've had industry people looking to hire from our department (BioEng) come to our classrooms and tell us that a MSBE is a entry level requirement both in terms of pay and hierarchy. Not just one, but a few of them have one this.

It is not enough to just have a BS/BA in a STEMy field, you need the MS as well. I think it's fair to conclude that the credentialing is then worth less at the undergrad level.

Many courses and students benefit from learning in person across many subjects, CS included. Sometimes it's the push they need, sometimes it's the value their classmates bring, sometimes it's the value the professor brings.

Online courses are great, but they don't replace everything. I don't think the future of universities is bleak. The explanations above considering that we have a surplus of Ph.D.'s seems to be a lot more likely of a cause to this. Simple supply and demand.

> Online courses are great, but they don't replace everything.

The MOOCs don't work well because they are 100% virtual. What they need is a bit of in-person, human touch. I'd like to see a system where online courses are being supervised by "educational coaches" who are not necessarily experts in the field, but experts in motivation and maximizing results.

Imagine a remote location, where there are no universities. A number of people could take completely different online courses there, monitored by the same coach. The role of the coach is mostly to witness the effort of the student (great for motivation) and counsel the student as to how to apply his effort most efficiently. The coach could help organize local study groups as well, if there are enough students. Technical questions could be handled by online forums and the MOOC staff. The training of the MOOC counselors could be a MOOC course itself, to spread the system organically.

I imagine the MOOCs could replace intro courses where classes are currently over 100 students. For smaller specialized classes at the upper undergraduate levels (and K-12 with its lower class size) a good teach modifies how they teach depending on specific students and the class over all. We have had a mass system of learning without a teacher for 500 years. The printed book.

The future of lower-tier universities is bleak. Once MOOCs have been refined, top-ranked schools will dominate market share, and if they play it right, will make a lot of money. Who would rather take classes at a run-of-the-mill state school vs. an Ivy League university online?

And when that happens, it will open questions about the antiquated college admissions processes of said universities, which evolved from the physical limitations of campuses. Who is the more ideal job candidate between person A who was admitted to an Ivy League because he/she had the know-how and resources to play the college admissions game vs. person B who didn't, if person B is able to get higher grades on said Ivy League coursework? This will no longer be a hypothetical question when MOOCs have matured. This effect will put downward pressure on tuitions, which will be a good thing for students, while at the same time enriching the handful of colleges and universities with enough of a brand name to make it in the MOOC world.

I very strongly doubt that. The market for a piece of paper is way too strong. That's why this stuff is expensive. Everyone can do this stuff, so the surest (and most advertised) way to get a leg up in the economy is by getting a piece of paper.

That effect only seems to be growing. That said, certainly do agree with you in principle.

"The market for a piece of paper is way too strong."

Penguin, PwC and EY have already dropped university degrees as a requirement.

"The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters, made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...

"It found no evidence to conclude that previous success in higher education correlated with future success in subsequent professional qualifications undertaken."

http://www.ey.com/uk/en/newsroom/news-releases/15-08-03---ey...

Also related

"Goldman last year also made other moves to help it identify strong candidates who may not attend Ivy League schools by scrapping first round interviews on college campuses in favor of a video platform."

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-goldman-sachs-hiring/goldm...

High school drop out here, I'm in a management/special projects position at a software company. My ability to self educate allows them to use any language, tool or framework relatively quickly without swapping out staff that have been approved for that purpose by academia. Given my short tenure in the development market in comparison to the price I command at least in my case not having formal education is actually more valuable than having one.

I've hired dozens of managers and developers over the years and had no clue if they had a degree or were self educated.

I adhered to Aaron Swartz not degrees when hiring

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hiring

Also plenty of good trade careers to be had - get paid while you learn, be your own boss, useful skills for your own place/life, zero debt, plenty of work (so hard to find a good tradesman). I know what I would choose if I were 16 again.

The whole system reminds me of professional taxi drivers and Uber drivers. The established education system is based on legal proof and bureaucratic paper trails(analogous to taxi medallions), made to guarantee some level of competence(being a taxi driver vs Uber driver).

The whole prestige of academia isn't access to information: internet has more academic content than any university(e.g. Sci-hub, Arxiv, book sites, online courses). Universities own vast collections of lab equipment/tools/devices which universities can afford due economy of scale(serving groups), this "lab-grade" stuff is out of budget for most people. Of course there are areas where research can be done with older, cheaper and simpler equipment, but cutting edge science is confined to top-hardware owners: An example is amateur astronomers having much less capable telescopes and recording equipment, but still capable of advancing science with affordable devices.

> The whole prestige of academia isn't access to information: internet has more academic content than any university

This is not the case at all for many fields. In my branch of linguistics, for example, the majority of important literature is not available online. A person cannot teach themselves this field; you need access to the print resources in a large library at a handful of universities. Now, since the dawn of ebook sharing sites, my colleagues and I have been gradually scanning resources and uploading them to Libgen or the like, but progress is slow and we have barely scratched the surface.

> in my theoretical CS and math classes professors only wrote proofs on the blackboard for 1.5h and then left

Weird, my professors answered questions that I and my coursemates had.

No it won't, because the reason they ask for a degree has little to do with actual coursework.

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