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Comment by hooch | Hacker News Reader

“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning“

Isn’t this how Steve Jobs treated college? And “Apple” was his “diploma”?

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As an employer I would not care much if a new hire only had the skills of uni but not the diploma. But I’m lazy and there is no way I’m going to do what’s essentially 5 years worth of examination to ensure the candidate lives up to some self professed level of education. Especially not in a 100+ pile of applications from others who where vetted as they went by the university. It’s not “certification” over actual learning. It’s the fact that the companies need easy certainty of that actual learning or you’re going to the bottom of the pile of applications. If you don’t have a certificate but have other proof of skill that’s just as good. Dropped out of uni to build a company that managed to launch a product but later went under? Great, who cares about the diploma, you have proof of you ability.

If someone's really motivated, there's also enough online courses which give certificates (MITx style) to collect almost the whole uni curriculum. Even with paying for that certificate, it's way cheaper than uni.

Generally it doesn't matter as the hiring manager isn't going to see the application if the HR peon doesn't see the boxes they want checked.

Yes, but he might stick around and take and pass the Ph.D. qualifying exams and then be well on his way to a Princeton degree: At least at one time, the Princeton math department Web site stated that, IIRC, "students are expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own and that no courses are offered to prepare students for the qualifying exams. Courses are introductions to research by experts in their fields."

So, look at the qualifying exams, see what might study, and while attending classes attend the ones that can help with the exams.

In addition, might have available some profs to answer questions.

In addition, likely one way to impress Princeton or any university is to publish, and one way to start to do that is to attend research seminars and see what some of the open questions are, also notice what some of the profs and grad students are working on. So, this way get some guidance on what might attack as a research problem.

I got a good pure/applied math Ph.D. Well over 50% of what I needed and used for courses, the qualifying exams, and my research was what I'd studied independently after my 4 year college degree and start of grad school.

Then a grad course in optimization gave a good introduction to the Kuhn-Tucker condition, maybe say Karush-Kuhn-Tucker. After the course I saw a tricky question about the constraint qualifications, didn't see an answer in the library, so signed up for a 'reading course' to 'investigate' the question. Two weeks later I had a nice, clean solution, wrote it up, and was done with the course -- two weeks. Later I published. There I'd noticed that my work also answered a question stated but not solved in the famous Arrow, Hurwicz, Uzawa paper applying the KKTC to economics. I published in JOTA.

So, a 'walk in' student at Princeton might have been able to have done much the same. With such research and passing the qualifying exams they would be on the way to a Princeton Ph.D.

Many (Some?) schools operate that way---the first step in a PhD is a qualifying exam. Some students may be able to pass it immediately after their undergraduate studies, while others (most?) require some remediate studying---undergrad classes, I guess.

UT Austin, at the time I was there, used the other (and better, I think) method: breadth and depth graduate classes, typically more advanced versions of advanced undergrad classes. The breadth classes covered most of CS, while the depth classes were more introductions to specific areas of research.

Edit: Oral quals are just hazing, in my opinion.

Princeton math (and other?) department specifically advertise that their research-only PhD program is unusual or unique.

https://www.math.princeton.edu/graduate

Generals/Quals require 1-2years of graduate level study, not remedial undergrad, if you look at the material covered and the syllabus and levels assigned to courses at various colleges. It just so happens that at a school like Princeton, 1st year PhD students have already taken graduate level classes in their field, or equivalent self study.

On orals, I did some!!

Maybe the first was as a senior. I got Kelley, General Topology and once a week gave a lecture to a prof! One week a chapter, and the next some exercises! It was fun!

The next time was on a written qualifying exam: The exam had an error, and I wasted time trying to prove it! I asked for an oral. One guy tried to haze me, but the other profs were nice, and I walked out with a rare "High Pass".

The third time was for my oral defense of my Ph.D. dissertation.

I was out running, and when I got back my wife said I'd gotten a phone call from a prof, the Chair of the committee that was to approve my dissertation -- no pushover, the Chair and a majority of the committee had to be from outside my department. Well, the Chair called me. Still with sweat from running, on my back on the bed, I had the actual oral exam! He had a question about one paragraph, so I reworded it, had my word processing retype the thing, and he was happy.

Then the fourth oral exam was the dissertation defense -- it was for show since the real one had been over the phone. The Chair looked really serious and let me look really serious and good.

Maybe there was one more: I'd rushed ahead in freshman calculus and done the first year on my own. Then I asked to start on sophomore calculus and never take freshman calculus. So, the prof gave me in effect an oral exam on freshman calculus. He concluded I'd passed and let me in sophomore calculus. He did say that he couldn't give me course credit for freshman calculus, but fine with me -- I just wanted to get going, get on with calculus, and not repeat what I'd just studied well.

You don't get to do exams and that is massive difference. As a motivation and as a feedback too.

The just show up mentality exists, but those people are learning online or reading books. What’s the advantage of commuting to a live lecture?

Mainly the syllabus and being told what to ignore.

And a forced pace, to keep moving instead of disappearing down every passing rabbit-hole.

This is a big one. I sat in on a number of 400 level CS courses after I graduated, and a big factor was just having a scheduled place to be, and homework assignment due dates that forced the correct pace for learning. The pace also made it easy to start the work early, but not obsess if I hit a roadblock, since there was a lot of opportunity to ask questions leading up to the due date. I don’t think I’d have gotten through the same course work without the classroom lectures. Double bonus was the social aspect, talking to other students and regularly walking with the prof after class.

How did you stay motivated to finish the homework or projects to the same degree as if you were being graded? I feel like the one factor that changes the equation is that grading inherently motivates even those who want to learn for learnings sake - it forces you to move faster and study harder with time and grade challenges.

Do you feel like you learned the material to a level that you would have had it been graded for you??

I was one of those students who didn’t care about the grade except as a proxy for learning. I never understood why other students would try to argue with profs about test grades, when it was clear they list points because they misunderstood something. That said, the thing that kept me from getting C’s in courses I didn’t like was that I was motivated to do at least decent at the things I do.

For the classes I sat in on, the motivation was that I was interested in the topic. But the social aspect really helped. Even though I wasn’t enrolled, knowing I was going through the same pain helped. I’m not surprised that MOOCs havn’t taken off like people assumed they would. There is nothing like sitting near people to really feel like doing something.

Interesting. I agree about the MOOCs. It takes a lot of willpower and even then, it just doesn’t feel the same. There’s something about being forced to show up and sit through two hours of intellectual rigor and at least try to understand as much as possible. I guess it’s the same reason people go to the library to study.

Btw did you ask the profs if you could take the exams , and did you? Were they willing to? They are usually a little averse to extra work lol.

I think that one of the under-rated aspects of having classmates is finding out how little they understand. From the professor it's easy to get an idea of what the perfect student would know, in week 5, but it's much more helpful to have some realistic benchmarks.

Besides, of course, getting to bounce ideas off each other, etc.

How do you sit in on classes?

Do you actually just show up? Or do you have to audit the class and register, but for free?

I have just shown up and asked the prof if they minded, at the end of the first class.

The irritating thing nowadays is that sometimes materials are behind a wall on the university website.

As an aside, back in the good ol' days, students paid their instructors directly, out of pocket. You can damn well bet more than "near-zero" effort would be applied in that case.

Anyway, society spends a lot of effort supporting students, from scholarships and tax exemptions to the social beliefs that allow the random person to spend several years doing nothing apparently productive without censure. But all that only applies to students actually enrolled---non-guerrilla students. Guerrilla studenting, as it was in the past, would only be the province of the idly wealthy. That, I think, is why no one tries that route.

If people living in Princeton had, let's say, a high quality UBI for life, I think a TV ad campaign saying just this would pack their lecture halls

At which point Princeton would enforce their membership rules but that's another atory

I suspect this trick is already harder to pull off at a university in a big city, compared to one in a little college town.

One key thing this paragraph misses is the characterization of this sort of person. Imagine we have a person that would independently, without extrinsic reward or 'push', show up to classes completely of their own accord. And we must further assume that they would engage in all assignments and somehow try to regularly test their understanding - the feedback exams offer is crucial to demonstrating understanding. And we assume they're doing well on Princeton quality and standard of work, all completely independently.

How did this person do in high school? Given high school is orders of magnitude more trivial, we can assume they were likely at or near the top of their classes, and probably would have shown remarkable results in skill assessment exams. And with that sort of motivation he also probably would have been involved in immense extracurricular and other such events. This person would likely have been able to get into any university he ever wanted.

Top universities do provide a certainly better than average education, but their main strength has nothing to do with their quality of education. It's the quality of their student body - which turns success stories into a self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you start an 'basketball school' and only accept people that are at least 6'6", highly athletic, can dunk from x feet, run 100 meters in y seconds, etc. Go figure -- you're going to 'produce' a disproportionately huge number of NBA quality players simply because your admittance is already heavily biased to individuals who are already headed in that direction.

The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton which would be comparable to the sort of person that could get admitted to 'Basketball U'. Regardless of what happens during those 4 years, you're already almost certainly going to be ahead of 99% of the rest of the population. The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'. E.g. even if our basketball university had a pretty bad education system, you'd still see NBA quality players emerging from it at a way way higher rate than the population of non-admitted individuals.

Part of the advantage of a quality student body, to other students, is that classes can be more rigorous and move faster and farther.

Adult learners are a demographic that could be highly motivated as you describe but often wouldn’t have any chance of getting in through the application process of an elite university. There are a lot of intelligent people out there who didn’t engage well with school when they were young for whatever reason but come to place a high value on education later in their lives.

I think this group is quite poorly served by our current system.

I disagree. I was able to get into one of the best graduate programs in my field a few years after a mediocre undergraduate record. This took some preparation, but it came down to finding other avenues to prove myself. The committee knows your undergrad record doesn't mean much if it was many years ago. "What else have you got?" they might ask. It takes some effort and creativity, but it can be done.

Adults with a newfound motivation are valuable and they know that. But just saying so isn't enough.

That's awesome that it worked out so well for you! It's not something that I've tried myself, just the impression that I have. I do wonder though if grad school admissions might be another story compared to undergrad, since they probably see a lot more older applicants with work experience and are possibly more used to adjusting their evaluations based on what the most recent/relevant signals are (just as businesses do when hiring).

But leaving during undergrad (or just never going to college) then excelling in self-learning and industry seems to put you in a much more awkward position when it comes to continuing onward with education. You are far beyond most undergrad-level courses, but in most cases you need that bachelor's degree to even be considered for grad-level programs--or at least I believe that's the case? You end up needing to waste years of your life and tons of money just to qualify for the courses that would actually teach you something new.

So perhaps the problem is as much that there just aren't compelling tracks offered to people who don't fit neatly into the lines as it is about admissions flexibility.

>The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton. [..] The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'.

That is precisely what signalling means. Top colleges pick only does who have signalled being over 99.99% of the population in things like intelligence, conformity and work ethics, then they filter out a bunch of them that never end up their degrees, and now their having their degree signals that you are a top 99.999% worker.

How long do you think their signalling value would last if they selected the same group of students, sent them to Aruba for four years, and then handed them diplomas?

That'd be a really interesting experiment.

I think the sort that get accepted to these programs also tend to be the sort that would consider just sitting on the beach sipping martinis to be something that'd rapidly become hell. It's just boring. So you'd have a group of ultra highly driven people with 4 years of undirected self study, but also access to pretty much all the knowledge they could ever want in the era of the internet.

It's really impossible to predict, but I do think the results would be interesting and not necessarily what you're implying. In today's era of assumption of education = skill, we often forget things like the Wright Brothers were a highschool grad and a highschool dropout -- yet they effectively invented aeronautical engineering with some skills they picked up operating a bicycle repair shop. There's some major dissonance between what we, collectively, ought be doing today - and what we actually are doing. I think it's a mixture of exponential leaps in entertainment and a general worsening in the condition of entrepreneurship (imagine how laws you'd be breaking by trying to fly your own homemade airplane now a days!) Your idea would at least certainly help combat the latter simply because that's all there'd be to do!

> The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton

This doesn't explain why a dropout (or even just someone with an acceptance letter but who never joined) isn't worth as much in the labor market as someone who finished the degree.

Why not? Those things also tell me what sort of person you are. If you took away that extra information and only told me which job applicants got accepted to Princeton and which didn't, then it would still be useful signal on its own.

> The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received.

Ability. You’re talking about ability. Caplan estimates that on average the return from education is ~70% signalling and ability, 30% changes in human capital if I remember right.

Does he break down signalling and ability?

Those two seem to me to be vastly different things.

That's silly. Of course you have a filter for those likely to succeed. So do all institutions in the same business of the same tier. Then, you compare them on what they did with that human capital. Some could do better than others.

Just because I build a cabinet out of good, knot-free straight boards doesn't mean the cabinet is all about the boards.

I got a coursera account and I believe that's good enough for a while for education. I will get a degree as a stamp when situation demands.

Lol this is absolutely false. You would 100% get ejected from a Princeton class room.

Only if you're disrupting class. You wouldn't be able to attend labs though or pass exams.

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