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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

Over the past couple years I think I’ve come over to the point of view that the university degree system should be abolished and that higher education needs to be restructured.

Higher Education was born out of the need to verify applicant knowledge for employment. Then society realized we needed institutions to instill that knowledge. So the university system was born to disseminate knowledge.

But today we have infinitely better ways to disseminate information and the only reason we aren’t using them is because Universities don’t want to lose their stranglehold on education. The end result of which is an elitist system that traps knowledge behind a very expensive paywall. So expensive that only 27% of the nation manages to actually get a degree.

I don’t have a problem with the Universities still existing. But I do think we should make a free education available online for all people and grant degrees based on standardized testing.

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I've been working through some of the MIT OCW math courses lately. It's actually been a better experience in many ways than my old college classes. Instead of sitting in a room full of 100+ people with a teacher too busy to answer questions I can sit back on my couch with a laptop and a lemonade and take my time, pause, rewind, etc.

There is something valuable in the kind of direct interaction you get at higher course levels in most colleges though. Any real alternative to the current system is still going to have to employ specialized, dedicated staff to answer questions. Crunching people through a meatgrinder of canned lectures and standardized testing is only going to take you so far.

There's an interesting supply issue in your example, as well. I mean, those were MIT courses after all, produced mostly by tenured faculty paid to teach students enrolled at MIT, not DIY courses produced by freelance instructors on the internet. Now the ratio of how many students can be taught by one instructor does go up greatly with something like OCW, but it seems we still need some sort of system where the people producing and updating that material have jobs that let them do so.

(If we massively shrink higher education, we'll also need some alternate way of paying people to do scientific research, since currently universities are the source of a lot of that as well. But that could at least in principle be decoupled from the education angle, at least for undergrad education.)

An interesting corollary is that something like OCW might eventually mean that we need a small group of highly-paid, extremely talented instructors but far fewer average instructors. Or maybe all the average instructors can stop giving lectures and instead offer their services as tutors?

I'm working on something a lot like this right now...

Clearly the free offerings out there need refinement and the point you make about interaction is just one area. But my point is we should only care about the knowledge when certifying someone with a degree. So open it up to any business out there to educate people and just standardize what students have to learn to get a degree.

I guarantee if you submit the task of educating people to the world of startups you’ll get thousands of systems that are better than the current system and all of them will cost way less than $100,000.

Maybe. You might also just get a lot of companies that learn to game the system and crank out students that test well but that haven't really learned much. Commercial enterprises optimize for commercial goals. Look at the University of Phoenix, for example.

If people were spending their own or their family's money for all of the bloat, better decisions and better education would be the eventual result.

Right now things are driven by pressure groups and ideas that are incessantly repeated, but that have no basis in fact, both of which can shape policies freely when costs are simply shifted to the taxpayer.

We are told that if we don't overspend on education, we'll have much worse crime. But spending on simply maintaining order, according to Malcolm Gladwell's book Tipping Point seems more immediate and effective.

And people without the benefit of sitting in a classroom do not run out and commit crimes necessarily. But people who are more impulsive by nature, more likely to commit crimes are more resistant to schooling, the exact opposite of what is constantly repeated as proof that we must turn the minds of our children over to the government.

Why do you think more than 27% of the nation needs a college degree?

I think the original point of college was to pass on information we as a society felt people needed for life and I think EVERYONE should have access to that information. Whether they choose to take advantage or not.

The point is it shouldn't be locked away from anyone not wanting to go into major debt to obtain it.

> I think the original point of college was to pass on information we as a society felt people needed for life

Actually, high school was supposed to do that, and before that, grade school. Instead, they're largely child care, and college may be going the same way.

He didn't imply that. In fact it sounds like he's in favor of less college education. At least in the traditional sense.

How can a system of qualification not be elitist? Some pass, some fail, that will never change. Strip the "elitism" out of degrees and all that will happen that another qualification will take its place as the gold standard.

An elitist system divides people into an elite and the others.

So a system where you have demonstrate the ability know and do a certain set of things, and give unlimited attempts. Then provide enough help to enable everyone to get over that line. There is some military training that work like this: train/test then if the person fails, retrain and retest and repeat. Everyone learns the material and is credentialed as such.

I agree this will not create the gold standard. The gold standard will still be knowing the right people, and belonging to the right clubs. It may just be that the clubs are not Yale and Harvard.

The military washes people out all the time. What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10?

It is a sad indictment of our society when "elitism" is something to discourage. Let's be very clear: the opposite of elitism is mediocrity. But there will always be bastions of those who strive for excellence.

I think T_TTB's original point about elitism was not to just give everyone a degree, but that the financial cost of college makes it inaccessible (or at least difficult) for a lot of people, regardless of their academic ability. On the other hand, if your wealthy parents made big donations to an Ivy League college, getting admitted and collecting your degree won't be all that difficult.

Bush's 2001 commencement speech at Yale sums it up nicely: Bush poked fun at his average college record while at the Ivy League school. "And to you 'C' students, you too can be president of the United States," he said to a crowd that rippled with laughter.

The president also got in a good-natured jab at his vice president, who attended Yale for a time. "A Yale degree is worth a lot, as I often remind Dick Cheney, who studied here but left a little early," Bush said. "So now we know, if you graduate from Yale, you become president. If you drop out, you get to be vice president."

Cheney got into Yale but flunked out. Bush got his degree, in history. Opinions on what that says about his academic ability vary.

> What proportion of applicants makes it as a Navy SEAL, is it even 1 in 10?

I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education.

I kind of knew that my point about training techniques could easily be misunderstood. I am not trying to say there are not elites in the military, Seals are elite. What percentage of people fail basic training?

If elitism is "a situation in which power is concentrated in the hands of a limited number of people". Then opposites of elitism are freedom, and direct democracy.

We are talking about education. Look at literacy levels Sweden. Here is my understanding of how it works: people who don't meet the standard have to go to night school till they meet it. They have the highest rates of adult literacy in the world. Do they have mediocrity? Do they have elitism?

Can excellence be nearly universal?

I am saying you can teach most people the content of an excellent university education.

That is absolutely not true. My undergraduate degree was in Mech Eng. Even people with As in A-level maths and physics struggled with some of the course. Half (possibly more) of the freshers I enrolled with didn't graduate from that course with me, they either dropped out altogether or switched to something easier. Or some people repeated a year. But if you don't get partial differential equations (for example) on the second attempt, you're probably not going to get them ever. Doesn't mean you're a bad person - just means you should do something else with your life.

A vanishingly small percentage of the population is capable of a true university education. The only way to enroll more is to relax the standards and simplify the material. Which is exactly what New Labour did with their arbitrary goal of 50% of the population to be graduates.

BTW according to Wikipedia, of every 200 applicants to the SAS (most of whom have already qualified as Paras, they're already elite) only 30 make it. Or if you want to be a fighter pilot in the Air Force, or a Captain in the Navy. Using your analogy, perhaps basic training is analogous to secondary school - it is certainly not analogous to a degree.

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