Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

If Shaw wanted a college guarantee, he could merely start a few of them, with that kind of money.

It's a big puzzle to me why this doesn't happen more often. In the past it did. Fighting inequality or discrimination, especially at the professional level, started when someone said, "Okay, I'm just going to make a school for my own then." My favorite example of this is the dismantling of Jewish exclusion at New York medical schools, which happened by creating new medical schools that did not discriminate. [1]

The idea that prestige is entrenched, basically, is wrong. Maybe that idea is the main obstacle to education reform.

Although maybe this is already happening for rich people. Alt Schools come to mind, although its story has come to an end.

I don't think it's possible for the superrich, as a class, to guarantee admissions for their kids at elite universities, because there's only so much space. So why haven't they built their own school?

[1] http://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC18080...

He cannot start a new college. The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college.

It is about signaling, not education.

And for that, you need time for the college "image" to become elite.

> The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college.

I've taken community college CS, and I've taken CS50 (online). I did not find this to be the case.

The “start your own college” approach worked out OK for Leland Stanford...

and Andrew Carnegie

Don't forget Andrew Mellon ;)

I think this comment fails to see that this isn't about philanthropy but about buying into networks/access/prestige that these schools (Yale, Horace Mann) provide.

Leland Stanford's reason for starting Stanford in his son's name was to honor his son's memory (who died when he was nine). Perhaps if his son was alive and wanted to attend college, he may have donated to Harvard or Wharton instead.

It took over 50 years for Stanford to reach the second ranks of elite colleges, and plausibly 80 years to be unambiguously among the first rank. Investments that pay off after death have few takers.

Helped if the first graduate not only made an absolute fortune, translated a well-known work of classics, and became President...

The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college

I'm sympathetic to your signaling point of view, but this statement is definitely wrong. CS curriculum varies a lot between the top schools and a typical public university.

For example I just now looked at the labs for Operating Systems at University of North Carolina and compared that to the work I did at CMU. UNC has students implement malloc and free. At CMU I implemented a process scheduler and virtual memory system.

(Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student in real-time operating systems at UNC.)

Each program has its own strengths, and simply comparing between similarly titled classes is an unfortunately poor metric. (Eg. At UNC, OS is really an introduction to C and OS concepts class. The Operating System Implementations class sounds more similar to CMU's OS Class.) Academic programs need to be compared holistically, and only if one is consistently worse than the other do you have an answer. (Otherwise I could go and claim that UNC is better than CMU because our real-time group is much better.)

Of course, that's too much analysis for most people (including me), so I would argue that looking at where graduates work is typically an okay proxy for undergraduate educational quality.

I fully admit that my entire understanding of the UNC curriculum is what I just gathered in 5 minutes of googling/reading. So ya, just comparing labs from similarly named classes is definitely not the best methodology.

That being said I've spent a lot of time in my career recruiting students out of undergrad. And I've noticed significantly more rigor and in depth work from students from some of the top schools compared to most everywhere else.

But CMU has one of the greatest CS departments in the world. Harvard does not.

And UNC is a top tier CS school, not even close to representative of "local branch campus".

My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free... CMU's sophomore systems course is a lot more rigorus, let alone their OS course.

And that's in systems courses where the variance is actually a lot smaller than in other subfields. There was simply no course in my undergraduate institutions curriculum where you could learn what a Turing machine or even DFA was! We never saw real asymptotic complexity analysis (our algorithms course spent most of the semester reviewing basic data structures as interview prep). Obviously no AI or ML course. Even where there was coverage the material covered was so different. For example, the PL course was all about using a functional PL and didn't include any of the type theory, logic programming, language implementation work, etc. It was a watered down version of SICP, which is an intro course.

If you think the difference in quality between UNC and CMU is large, consider the massive difference between branch campuses and top-ranked public research universities. For all practical purposes, "CS" means something very different at regional branch campuses than at top tier research universities like UNC and CMU.

> The CS program for undergrad in Havard is exactly the same as your closer public college.

No. Not even close. Unless you're taking about flagships like uiuc and Berkeley (which are not local for 99%).

This may be true in the humanities but is nowhere near true in the mathematical sciences.

My final year analysis course at college only covered a fraction of the content in the FIRST year advanced math sequence at Harvard.

As someone who went to one of those truly local state schools then taught at a #1 CS school: the quality difference in CS educations is absolutely insane. See also the "Java Schools" rant.

I searched through your comment history for the "Java schools rant" but to no avail. Pointer?

I went to school just as Java hit .. saw the old C days and then Java (in my OS course .. the horror!). I feel Java for OS stunted me to this day. Curious what your thoughts are on this.

Sorry, not my rant. See here: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...

(Also, don't read anything into my user name. I just happened to make my first comment about something related to java and then never logged out.)

Part of the difference is the level of competition with the other students. In math at least, if you want to be in classes with and compete against Putnam winners, there are only 4 or 5 schools you can go to do that.

It's very expensive to start a college. Most superrich can get their kids in or influence research or whatever they want to do more efficiently by donating to existing schools.

Another alternative is to fund a lab or think tank with no students.

I'd argue most newish schools are set up because their founders wanted to promote a new kind of education (Olin College's hands on engineering program, Liberty University's Christian environment, etc.) not just start Yet Another Prestigious University

Anyone that wants to go to college can (presumably) get into one. It's not that he wanted a college guarantee - he wanted guarantees at a select few colleges.

He, in my opinion, wanted to guarantee for his kids - the networks / access / prestige that come from attending elite schools Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Horace Mann, etc.

The motivation for David Shaw isn't fighting inequality or discrimination but ensuring the best possible outcome for his kids.

He didn't want to get his kids into a college which is very easy. He didn't want them to get into an a college with exceptional teaching and high standards either, given how academically high performing his kids seem to be they could easily have gotten into any second-tier university which have basically the same standard of teaching (especially if you know how to look for / ask for it) but not the same kind of prestige.

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