Comment by mithaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mithaler | Hacker News Reader

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I really resent the unexplained blanket assertion that "college is broken".

If it's hard-hitting enough for you to post as a rebuttal, it's hard-hitting enough for you to explain your reasoning for. I had a useful, fulfilling, transformative college experience that challenged my preconceptions and taught me how to reason and appreciate complexity; I will readily admit to the financial privilege I enjoyed going in, but I couldn't have done it without financial aid and I knew plenty of other people who went in with much weaker financial backgrounds than me who did just fine (i.e. without debilitating debt afterwards).

So please, explain to me how "college is broken". I don't mind challenging it, and I would certainly agree on an anecdotal basis at least that some colleges and external systems surrounding them are broken (e.g. SAT), but asserting "college is broken" without further explanation isn't a meaningful challenge--it's a provocation, and one I will gladly take.

Would you prefer the term "blatantly sub-optimal" in place of "broken"? Let's list off a few ways:

* Big lecture classes, where a professor delivers canned lectures to enormous crowds of people as though we still lived before the invention of online video and the printing press. As far as I can tell, this is strictly inferior to having a really good teacher record lectures, then put them online. Preferably with an option to play them at 1.4--2x speed. This would also free up time and resources to focus on the parts of the educational experience where college can be better than online lecture videos plus a textbook.

* Often, a whole class of people has to proceed through a set list of topics in lock-step. Some people will find this too slow, and others too fast, for any given topic. What if you want some time to really think through a particular topic? There's no time; you've got to go on to the next thing. And then at the end of the semester, there's a flurry of activity as people finish up final projects and study for exams, and then BAM! It's over!

* The workload tends to be heavily skewed to the end of the semester, so people seldom have enough time to devote to finishing projects properly. This has caused no end of frustration.

* People are crazy-focused on grades, often at the expense of their education. Grades are a clumsy proxy for learning. It's like trying to measure someone's happiness by how much they smile: there's a correlation, sure, but telling someone to smile more is not the best way to make them happier.

I could list more, but that should be enough for starters. Would you dispute the claim that such a system is at least a little broken? Or, if you prefer, blatantly sub-optimal?

I will not dispute that those are problems. I will dispute whether they're issues with all colleges.

I went to a liberal arts school, and a good one. I was never in a large lecture class (my CS101 class had 12 students in it), professors were mandated to have regular office hours and email availability to meet with students outside of classes for extra discussions and help, workloads were reasonably balanced over time, and no one really cared about grades or GPAs as long as they weren't so low that you got put on probation. (It goes without saying that we also didn't have anything resembling class rank, which is an awful concept in all possible ways.) In other words, none of those were issues in my college experience.

Thus, to me, that sounds more like an argument that "X College is broken" than "college is broken". Do some colleges offer sub-optimal educational experiences? I wouldn't doubt it. Do all of them? Clearly not, for those reasons at least.

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