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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

> In many fields competition for tenure is brutal

Why so? There are so many people who would like to study but can't get into an university. There (as you say) are so many professors who would like to teach but also get into brutal competition. Why not just build more universities? Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?) yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way?

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The barriers (at least in the US) to university study are seldom admission. There already exist many accredited institutions that admit essentially all applicants with a high school degree or equivalent. The things that stop people who would like to get a college degree are more often money and time. Incidentally, these are the same things keeping would-be professors from tenured positions. Someone has to pay the professors, after all.

I think OP was getting at "valued" degrees, eg: A degree from a name brand institution, where a good chunk of employers will recognize the name of said university.

Degrees from non-name brand institutions (eg: all the community colleges/2nd tier colleges like Western Washington University) are for checking off the requirement of having a degree. Its a serious put down, but the name brands thrive on being "selective" yet bribe-able.

There is quite a bit more value to be had at the latter group of institutions, tuition is ~$500 a class or ~$1500 a quarter at community colleges and of a similar caliber in quality, much more reasonable than the $1500+ charged per 5 credits at name brand colleges.

In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.

> Why not just build more universities?

Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling [1].

> Also why not start a private education company that probably wouldn't be eligible to issue government-accredited degrees (who but medical doctors and lawyers needs them anyway?)

The main reason anyone in the US goes to college these days is to get a degree, not to receive education related to any specific job. They want to get a degree because most employers still require a degree either for consideration or for promotion. The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified. Any employer that would accept a non-accredited degree from a private education company that could easily just be selling certificates (which already happens anyway) probably wouldn't even care if you had a degree in the first place.

> yet would provide university-level education quality and compete the free-market way

I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution, to the extent that it could afford to hire good professors away from existing universities and be a better option for them than pursuing tenured positions elsewhere.

Compounded with the unlikelihood that students would be able to get reasonable loans to attend a school that could very well be a scam, this seems completely untenable. Students get into enough debt as it is going to accredited institutions with government loans.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-disappearing-private-c...

> In the US it is very easy to get into a university. It is not so easy to get into a good university.

Because the academic job market is so tight, many of the professors at obscure poorly ranked universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.

You should probably replace “good” in your sentence with “prestigious” or the like.

> many of the professors at obscure unrecognized universities are amazing teachers who do solid (but perhaps not famous or well promoted) research.

If I were choosing who is going to teach me I wouldn't really care about what research do they do, I would care about how good they are at teaching.

If you are the university dean or administrator who hires the professors, you maybe prefer the hot-shot professor who brings in a boatload of research grant money over the professor who gets the best teacher ratings.

The university gets a cut of the grant money and gains a bunch of reputation points for putting out cutting edge research. High teacher ratings are great, but the big universities care less about these and more about the number of Science and Nature papers a professor produces.

Unfortunately students aren't involved in hiring decisions. Everything I've ever heard suggests that faculty at prestigious universities are universally there thanks to their research credentials, not their teaching credentials. This was certainly true of the school I went to.

> Because enrollment and the numbers of students who can pay are dwindling > I just don't see there being a significant market of people willing to pay full tuition for a non-accredited institution

Aren't US tuition fees already bloated?

> afford to hire good professors away from existing universities

Why not hire the professors that are still good yet not perfect enough to get through the brutal competition mentioned above?

> The employers require this because they see it (fairly or unfairly) as an easy way to weed out those who would be unqualified.

Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

> Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

You're absolutley right! This is very possible.

In practice, the process you describe is both more difficult than accreditation (because it's undefined) and less trusted by industry (because there's nobody trusted validating it).

Not always. Think programming language certification. If the company who created x offers certificate in x trust can be there. An exam is dufferent to a degree but it could work if say Apple or Microsoft started to offer a university and focus on tech like ai, etc. New York times offering an English degree. Scotland yard - security.

>Why is it not possible for a private non-accredited college to establish an industry-recognized degree of reputation?

It is absolutely possible. In fact, it doesn't even have to be a private institution. I have a CS degree from a public California university. The university itself is accredited, but my particular degree is not. There is no outside body that says that I learned anything at all about CS, just that I learned the bare minimum to get a bachelors degree from a UC school. The weight of the universities name is more than sufficient on its own to answer any question of whether my degree is worth anything.

Of course I suspect that it is in fact much easier to go down this path if you're already a globally recognized research university than if you're "Joe Schmoe's Computer Science Degree Emporium".

You know that unaccredited private universities (besides the phoney diploma mills) do exist, right?[0] The discussion shouldn't be about whether they can exist, but rather how much recognition they can garner across how broad of a spectrum of disciplines -- which goes up and down over time. I think we (as a civilization) are about to lose faith in academia, and I expect more opportunities in this space to open up, but I could be totally wrong.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unaccredited_instituti...

Edit: s/rime/time

> Why not just build more universities?

Because universities are fortresses designed to protect the weirdos who can't survive in the real world. We're passing through this awesome enlightenment phase where there's room for everyone. But you can't just throw one up on a thursday afternoon. Universities need a kind of social contract. (i realize the one true scotsman weakness here, but i think the point holds)

Universities are where you stick the rich kid that's not strong enough to run the family business. Sometimes, you don't even have to be rich.

The thing that's neat is sometimes an idea pops out of a university that's pretty good. Newtonian physics and evolution spring to mind. i'm obviously nuts.

i would encourage you to read [1]. I'm not exactly making an appeal to authority, it's more of a here's a much better, less cynical interpretation of what i'm trying to say.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html

Universities in the US are no longer institutions of higher learning; they are hedge funds with affiliated football and basketball teams. Because of this, universities have decided to drastically cut costs by replacing tenure-track positions with adjuncts. About 58% of faculty at American universities are non-tenure track, and that number is likely to increase over the coming decade as tenured professors retire [1].

[1] https://www.aaup.org/report/status-non-tenure-track-faculty

Not many companies are going to hire an engineer from a non-accredited university. Sometimes it is specifically called out in the job posting. Accreditation is there for a reason, otherwise you end up with a bunch of people with degrees from diploma mills and ITT-like organizations applying for jobs they have no business being in.

Perhaps but a particular private company can establish reputation that would ensure whoever graduates from it actually has acquired the knowledge and skills listed.

In fact I even believe that teaching and skill/knowledge-certifying companies should be separated entirely. A person should be able to acquire knowledge whatever way they find comfortable (e.g. choose a company that would teach them or study entirely on themselves if they are sufficiently resourceful) then go to a reputable institution that would test them and issue a diploma.

Who is going to want to attend a school with zero reputation

When its job is to teach rather than to issue a diploma which other parties would recognize, attending a couple of lectures would be enough for me to see how well do they teach if it's worth my money. There should also be money-back warranty for those unsatisfied with the quality of teaching. At some point, if I were satisfied, I would also recommend it to people I know and such a recommendation would be enough for me to give it a try if I were them.

Measuring such a subject by thyself may seem like a fallacy as many people obviously don't think like I do but I believe there are many (a number sufficient to sustain a business) who do think the same way in such a big country.

Government jobs in particular often require degree (not university) accreditation for real engineering degrees. They generally don't require the same for CS though, so there are plenty of tech jobs that don't need accreditation at all. I'm a government contractor working as a software engineer with a non-accredited CS degree from a UC school. If I had a degree in engineering, it would absolutely need to be accredited (and my university's engineering degrees are).

Some government jobs do want the accreditation--you need it to become a patent agent, for example--though others don't. I think it might be related to whether it's officially an "engineering" or "science" job.

It's a little aggravating though, since many good programs (e.g., Stanford) don't bother with the ABET stuff for computer science.

I mean many companies don't care if you have a degree at all, let alone where that degree comes from.

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