YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education | Hacker News Reader

YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education

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120 pointsasciimike100 comments

In my experience (going through YC twice), YC is more like a replacement for an MBA.

YC doesn't teach you the fundamental skills of programming that you need to become a software engineer. A lot of people don't want to take a risky shot at being a successful entrepreneur. They would much rather have a stable job paying them a six-figure salary. That's one career track that a traditional CS degree provides. If that's your goal, YC isn't really the right way to go. You are much better off going through Lambda School.

However, let's say you have some experience as a software engineer, but you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things. You're willing to take a little financial risk for a more interesting career path. One option is to go back to school and get an MBA. But YC is really a good alternative here. You will learn a lot about business, even if you are the "technical cofounder" and spend most of your time writing code.

Agreed – and fwiw if this line resonates:

"you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things"

I'd also recommend that engineers look into career switching to product management.

Don't you only have like a 1% chance of getting into YC? Not knocking what you're saying, just pointing out that getting into a solid MBA program != getting through YC. I feel like getting through YC means you're already good enough at the business side of things to at least come up with a viable business model.

I am always concerned by the idea that universities simply exist to hand out education. Most of the science, software, technology, etc. that is being used by all these companies with people obsessed with disrupting education has been developed, in part, by research laboratories at universities. It sort of feels like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I always wonder how much the "disrupter" knows about the university when they ignore all the things universities do besides hand out undergraduate degrees.

This sort of assumes that research can only happen at - or in partnership with - a university doesn't it? Those two activities (research and learning/certification) do not have to be tied together.

Indeed, just because the research university has been a successful model doesn’t mean others aren’t possible, like RAND, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research, SRI International or the Max Planck Society.

Those kind of environments happened only because those companies had near-monopoly like status that protected research activity from the need to commercialize. Most corporate research labs aren't going to do anything that won't lead to some kind of revenue generation 3-5 years down the line. Gov'ts can invest in the long-term

I suspect we're looking at the exceptions here, not the rule.

RAND--born at the beginning of the atomic era RAND was and still can be seen as an extension of the federal government that also does work for other clients. Project Air Force, RAND's first and still biggest component is the civilian counterpart to "tell the Air Force when they're plans are stupid".

Bell Labs-- incubated at AT&T which enjoyed a near century long state granted monopoly in exchange for defense work and building out the national telephone infrastructure

All of whom were staffed by people heavily credentialed by universities, and who published in the same journals their University colleagues did?

That strikes me as exactly the same model, but without the teaching aspect?

Well, look at the Institute for Advance Studies in Princeton, and its siblings.[0]

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

The research university, but without teaching, is about as different from the research university as a horseless carriage is from a horse and carriage.

I disagree. The crux of the university - faculty mentoring junior researchers (aka phd students) remains in both setups (and in industry research labs). The undergrads at research universities seem to be lower on the priority list

Normal people think of the primary purpose of a university as educating undergraduates. If the only education going on in a research institute is apprenticeship as a researcher, possibly with some directly relevant technical courses this is so far from most people’s experience of a university as to be a different thing. Professional academics may disagree but if an institution goes from encompassing a broad section of society to a narrow one, from educating and doing research to doing research and education only as necessary to that and from providing a space for maturation and relaxation before adult life to being a professional workplace that’s a pretty drastic change.

A research university is a lot closer to a non research university than it is to a research institute.

They're both on a spectrum.

Medical school faculty, especially in soft-money positions, might never set foot in a classroom. Some of them will even have labs that are almost entirely postdocs and technicians. This doesn't seem wildly different from a research institute to me. If anything, the funding is probably less stable too, since you're on your own.

For undergrad and professional education (which is the majority of higher education) that would work, but IMHO people who aren't doing proper research in their respective fields aren't really capable of providing high quality education on the graduate level because they'd get out of touch with the advanced topics of the field, so at least there integration makes sense.

It would be a concern 30 years ago. But nowadays the training part of education can be separated from other intellectual pursuits because the sharing and debating of ideas has become so easy. You needed to be in a university to be even aware of conference debates - not anymore. If anything you 're more likely to enjoy conference lectures in video. And there are tons of ways for scientists to interact nowadays. Some academics use twitter as a continuous conference.

There is definitely a level of irreverence towards academic standards from this kind of technologists but this is a good thing.

Yeah, I agree. Having access to Twitter is basically the same things as going to Harvard.

I m talking about conferences. And i m serious

One of the root sources of US research productivity per dollar is that so much of it is done by graduate research assistants who are much cheaper than comparable employees in industry.

This was a really strange article for me. I'd love it if someone would tell me if I understood it correctly. The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value.

The author breaks down the value in terms of signalling (which I admit not to understand very well), human capital (i.e. a trained populace -- is there a more antagonistic way of putting it???), and fun for students.

Signalling seems to be validation of intelligence??? (I am SMRT)... I don't know. He has a big section labelled "In defence of signalling" where he seems to simply say that the 4 year wait to get your degree seems to be a bit of a waste of time. The university can provide the signalling by just handing out the accreditation...

He says nothing as far as I can tell about "human capital". Like an education... I just get the impression that the author assumes that there is no value in it... at all? I could imagine a followup article saying something like, "Well, why are we doing this education thing anyway -- Just train on the job! Cut out the middle man!" Except that he seems to want to pump Lamda for... no reason in particular?

I'm just going to ignore the fun bit because it seems to be there simply to make people angry. I guess...

Is this sarcasm? Am I intended to take this seriously (real question by the way)? More interestingly, is this a popular opinion around here given the front page placement?

The author is assuming familiarity with concepts and a body of research you do not appear to be familiar with. The fastest way to understand would be to read Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education[1].

The education system provides value by certifying potential employees/partners/mates as being of a certain quality. That’s signaling. Some of the quality is due to something the educational institute did, a treatment effect. Most of what selective institutes signal isn’t treatment effect though, it’s selection effects. Harvard matriculants we’re going to be successful with or without Harvard and the signal Harvard provides doesn’t distinguish much between them given the extremely low drop out rate, high grades and low variability of said grades.

Human capital is what educational institutes add, what they’re supposed to do, teaching skills someone somewhere cares about.

Given the amount Byrne reads I feel quite certain he values education highly. Schooling he may be more or less indifferent to as a college dropout.

Lambda has a superior model for education as treatment effect in its very narrow field to almost all universities given that the number that actually want to train software engineers is very low. Job training is what people want and they can do it well. This is good because giving people things they want and making their lives better is good.

As to universities and fun most people have a great time at university. Having free time, not working, being away from home, alcohol, other things, attempting to date, these are great. Many more people have fond memories of university because it was fun than because of anything they learned.

It’s not sarcasm. Many people think most of education is socially wasteful if privately beneficial because it’s true.

[1]I reviewed it. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/cua2dr/review_the...

I took this as a completely serious and reasonable proposal. For context, I have taught (middle school through University), am on the board of an education non-profit, have an advanced degree and plan on accumulating more of them.

What is unreasonable about what the author says? You seem put-off by the way they break down college into 3 principal components: signalling, training, and fun... But other than an emotional reaction to that framing, can you say why it's wrong? I can think of one piece left out, but I will explain why it's reasonable to leave it out.

As part of marketing 4 year liberal arts degrees, schools play up a fourth component, which was more of a factor in the past: non-economic human-development (i.e. learning certain topics enriches your life and adds meaning). I do think this is a real component, but I think, in an effort to maximize profit, universities have completely thrown this away in practice (while making it a cornerstone of their pitch). And if we separate economically usefully human development from non-economically useful human development, the later is (by definition) a luxury good. This luxury good can be obtained for free on the internet, so paying $100-500k for it is just signalling. Hence it can be ignored.

Don't get me wrong, I want to live in a world where everyone's motivation is non-economic human-development... But that is not the late-stage capitalism dystopia we find ourselves in - and I think the author does a good job describing the state of things.

Signaling means "how a good or service gives, shows, or enhances the value of the person who has it." What an elite college degree does is signal the person is in the elite knowledge class. It's a seal of approval. If you graduate from MIT, it signals you are very smart and adept in business, technology, or science.

I think his argument is that when the university signals, the teaching part is anti-climatic. In Japan, if you make it into Tokyo University, you are considered the right stuff, and what you learn isn't as important compared to making it there. The assumption is you can be taught or you teach yourself anyways.

Human Capital in this case means networking and potential. Being introduced to fellow high achievers, and having the innate ability to achieve high yourself.

I think he is pointing out that these days, Lambda could fit those important aspects better than a four year college. The knowledge part matters much less than being approved by high value and high status institutions, and being able to create a professional network of elite people.

I don't know my thoughts on this idea, but I hope this is accurate to him and helps understanding.

> The author seems to be saying outright that universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there has little value.

The author mentions that the value of college measured against alumni's wages does not follow a knowledge path (as if the skills increase your income) but a signaling path (as if other people can imagine what you are worth). Thats the spiel about the last semester being the most valuable one, regardless of its content.

There is no doubt that signaling is huge: as the recent scandal of admissions into top universities revealed, even though some parents bribed officials to enter college, the kids had no issues passing the classes. It would be cheaper if only going through the admissions process gave you accreditation, since that is the actual valuable part students compete for, and then let the curriculum be free for the alumni (graduating in 2 years instead? Not doing a bunch of classes you wont use, etc).

I agree with the author that the value of education is way overblown, but certainly not 0.

I read the article as a thought provoking way to just twist perspectives around and not as an actual proposal to dramatically revamp higher education. I found it interesting and mildly amusing.

As with one of the other respondents to your comment, I read it mostly as a fun and occasionally provocative flow of thoughts, rather than any specific call to action. It makes a decent attempt to demarcate the different types of value that the current university experience offers to students.

And of course, to do this comprehensively, one must acknowledge that one of the things that university acceptance and attendance offers is some sort of 'signal' of value, or intelligence, or virtue, or something, to a range of people: from parents and friends to wider society, including future employers.

Anyway, to TL;DR what I believe the message of the article is, you could try:

* A Lambda-school-like model might offer the educational value that major universities offer, but more cost-effectively

* A YC-like model might offer the signalling, relationships and networking value that major universities offer, but more quickly and efficiently

* We need to acknowledge that the non-educational aspects (as offered by the YC model) are important

So let's strip education of its value in learning things (replaced by Lambda or MOOCs) and its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that).

YC is not so much unbundling the Ivy league cartel as much as it is competing with it. Even though YC has a better track record in expanding its student base (in response to demand) compared to universities, it's still an elite institution creating a zero-sum game of vetting the "future leaders". The monetary incentive is not really "negative", as it still costs for people to move to SF for YC - and it raises the prices for everyone there.

I'd say both universities and YC have to be unbundled/disrupted. Presumably by some publicly traded entities whose profit depends on the productivity of the people they educate or vet (a publicly traded lambda or YC with research divisions etc). Then the public can invest on entities that benefit the overall productivity of their society instead of the ego of some academics.

Or probably a combination of both Lambda & YC: Education should be free, or even be paid. After all , it IS work. Incubators should be competing to attract the best candidates to educate.

> its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that).

There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans (Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died.

YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an accelerator.

[1] https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-t...

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthic...

>Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1],

Anecdotally, I can agree with this. Ethics class seemed to be more about learning how ethics are vague and how they can be used to 'ethically' justify even atrocious things. I really disliked my ethics class. Most of my classmates didn't like it either. We actually ended up getting into a big argument with the teacher once over something that ended with her just screaming at us all to shut up, told us we were all wrong then just made us read for the rest of class and wouldnt teach any more that class.

  Took a class, big fun
  Modern ethics 101.
  First day learned why
  Ethics really don't apply.
  - Steve Taylor

Apart from ethics classes, i think there is value in associating with other students and educators who uphold certain academic and professional ethics. It formulates a certain common mindset among students who may come from very disparate backgrounds (I'm not talking about the Ivies - those students usually come from similar backgrounds). You may also learn a lot from anecdotes that are not found in books or online lectures (e.g. in Medical school). I don't know how this is replicated in online schools, but i think it's an important part of education.

> a zero-sum game of vetting the "future leaders"

Vetting future leaders isn't zero-sum! To convince yourself, consider some societies that put hereditary aristocrats in charge of everything. Or thugs in charge. Or sincere makers. The sums are very different.

Startup idea: unbundle the party aspect of college. That kind of social life is not something you could purchase elsewhere right now. Figuring out how to replicate it would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people.

The problem is that the "party aspect" only works because it's bundled. "I'm going to spend the next four years of my life partying" is not the kind of decision that parents and society are likely to subsidize.

True. That format can’t be extracted in its entirety. But what kind of format could? I don’t think it would need to apply to only 18-22 year olds.

A lot of it is more valuable to young adults, who are still developing future social, professional, and romantic connections. Once you already have those connections, it's a fundamentally different problem--especially if one of the romantic connections works out and you end up married, maybe even having kids.

And frankly any environment where you put together large numbers of young adults will probably result in "partying" if they have enough time and space to do so. There's a reason that drunken sailors staggering back from shore leave are a centuries-old cliche.

Agreed. But perhaps it could be bundled with something else, like working remotely as a junior engineer at a startup for min wage < x < SF CS grad comp.

Peter Thiel called college a "consumption choice", and I think he is at least partially right about that.

People here have a very narrow view of education. How HN is helping Classic studies. Please enlighten me

I enjoyed this article but I find the people rejected by Harvard more interesting than the ones who dropped out. Warren Buffett is on this list. The people who dropped out after all always had an implicit invitation to come back if things didn't work out.

I don't know if this would work because it just shifts the education down to pre-18. This drastically benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive tutoring and natalist services that others can't match. It's hard enough as it is dealing with people who have been groomed from youth to be the elite in a culture that enables people to enter a four year college regardless of background; i think it would be ridiculous otherwise.

> But as YC’s success indicates, there have been many hypothetical billion-dollar companies that didn’t come into existence because the founders never got the right introductions. Your takeaway from this should be that if you’re very ambitious, the biggest risk you can take is to be a loner.

How can you possibly know that?

You can’t know but you can make inferences. If you are trying to do something big and risky you should be focusing on the reason you think it will work, making a big bet on your reason for being, your core competency. Everything else you follow best practice or buy in best practice.

The more ways you’re weird the more ways there are to fail. Be weird in the ways you are very confident in. Going it alone does not seem to be the way most people win big so unless you have excellent reason to think you’re different don’t go it alone.

YC might yet disrupt the Berkshire Hathaway model. Like other commentators point out, it has a long way to go before it replaces higher education. May be the closest it comes is replacing the MBA programmes.

I think this article is a bit of a stretch.

The smartest thing about lambda is they thought really carefully about their pricing model, what's the optimum price and method of paying for an education, if we're optimising for keeping student and educational institutions' incentives maximally aligned?

I'm not an expert but I think YC answers the same question but in a different context, with different actors.

I'm going to be that guy, but am I wrong on the fact that there's only one woman in the photo depicting what it looks to me like a YC "meeting"? That is compared to about ~40 guys that make the rest of the audience. That's a depressingly low percentage. Are there any public numbers on the men-to-women ratio when it comes to YC alumni?

They have a blog post for each session that covers this:

https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-summer-2019-batch-stats/

Thanks. 16% is still a surprisingly low number for 2019, I had expected something like 40-60 or at least 35-65. Also, surprising how they added black and Latino people to the stats but they “ignored” the Asian minority. Are they now part of the “privileged” minorities so that they can be ignored? If not, what’s the reason behind omissions like these?

The label is "UNDERREPRESENTED" so I assume any minorities represented as founders at or above their level in the general population are excluded?

That photo is over 10 years old. A lot has changed since then.

I had supposed so, but as I have just responded to another HN-er today’s figure of 16% is still nowhere close to parity. I had expected a closer number, seems like the industry is still very, very far from that. The people and the companies that matter should do a lot, lot more about this (and yes, I do count YC as a company/economic entity “that matters” when it comes to IT). We pride ourselves in wanting to invent driverless cars yet we’re not capable of providing the same economic opportunities to our daughters or sisters, a task that (technically speaking) should be a lot more easier to accomplish.

The people at YC would agree. They put a lot of hard work into this, not all of which is public; they aren't neglecting the issue. It's also, of course, not primarily technical.

Isnt that due to the success of women-only incubators who presumably absorbed the best candidates leaving YC with leftovers (men)?

https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-i...

It's not obvious that a women who qualified for either YC or one of those other accelerators would tend to prefer one of those others. Women-only acelerators may have some benefits to balance against some drawbacks, similarly to how we don't see women largely preferring women-only colleges over the best coed colleges.

That’s a really poor taste joke. You shouldn’t be making fun of those women like that.

Social Justice nonsense.

Look at the systems which reward X behavior in Y sex.

Assuming that access to partners is a primary behavioral motivator ( it is, it just is ). Then what rewards exist for women undertaking novel enterprises?

Very little. Or substantially less compared to males.

The systems running internal to humans don't preference the sex-barganing position of a woman when shes got money / power which comes with starting companies.

More simply:

Power / money doesn't beget better mate-optionality for women in the same way it benefits men -- so why would she do it?

Please stop the ignorant pandering.

Would you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? And especially please don't break the site guidelines by calling names like "ignorant pandering". We ban accounts that do those things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The simplest IT education truth: nothing can beat autodidactism and risk taking. Schools and unis mostly benefit themselves.

> Already, there are a few companies that have applied to YC, gotten accepted, and ostentatiously turned it down.

Can anyone shed some light into this? Why do companies turn down YC after being accepted?

A few reasons I've encountered:

They require founders to relocate

They take a non-trivial equity stake as the price of admission

It's a huge time commitment

Not stating that YC isn't an incredible program and a great value proposition. Just that it has some challenges.

That doesn’t make sense. All these are public. Why apply at all if that’s the case?

Startup Idea: A microlearning platform that unbundles skill based courses and empowers the right kind of signaling (e.g. LinkedIn certificates etc).

thoughts?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158

Welcome to the new and shiny version of anti-intellectualism: where the only purpose of education is to get a job and the value of a job is determined by how lucrative it is. Now scale that up to the level of an economy and you have a basic idea of how we live in a materially-rich and intellectually-poor culture.

In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative) training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already happened for fields like philosophy or literature.

For someone who can’t distinguish between schooling and education to accuse others of anti-intellectualism is a bit rich. To read an article in which the author engaged with ideas and call him an anti-intellectual is practically self refuting. People who don’t care about ideas don’t think about them. They certainly don’t write about them.

The idea we live in an intellectually poor culture is wildly at odds with the facts. Most people don’t care about ideas, they never did. But now those who do can learn about them with greater ease than ever before, discuss them with more people and reach more people if they have anything to say.

You’re dismissing Byrne’s essay without being familiar with the economics literature on signaling in education and assuming that education can only happen in a university. Other people will learn about the signaling model of education[1] because of this. There’s an explosion of educational content on Youtube, free ebooks aplenty, edX, Coursera, the SEP. Most people don’t care but for those who do care about ideas this is probably the best time to be alive ever.

[1] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_1.h...

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th...

I don’t know how the availability of educational content online has anything to do what I said. And nowhere did I say that the only place one can get an education is within an institution. Your comment is a pretty big strawman.

Educational institutions in the United States have become customer-focused corporations in all but name. While it’s nice that information is available for personal use via the Internet (although frankly most of it has already been available in public libraries for the last century), that’s a separate point. The discussion is about educational institutions, not the ability of one to self-educate.

The point is: if you’re doing an economic analysis on the value of an education, you’ve already lost. Institutions which once were dedicated to timeless academic values are now mostly about making a buck. If you went to university a century ago, it was probably to pursue an academic career. If you go now, it’s probably to get a better job.

The fact that you as an individual can watch a YouTube course doesn’t change the fact that influential institutions have a dramatic effect on popular culture, society and politics, and ergo graduates of those institutions will shape society.

I think the reason that solely skills-based institutions never flourished is due to the kind of cronyism and old boy networks that the article strangely seems to see as one aspect of the current system that is worth preserving.

The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.

The problem with the decoupling you propose is that the elites will still want real education for their children, so those programs will also be filled with careerist strivers craving the stamp of upper-class signalling. Meanwhile, your "skills-based" programs will be devalued as a worthless trade school for wannabes (for an example of this, see employers who consider things like A+ cert a negative hiring signal).

I m not sure there is a lot of intellectualism coming out of universities nowadays. Rampant activist homoculture and the purging of all heresies have left little room for it.

You d have to point out some important public intellectual functions that universities did recently. Indeed the idea that elite intellectualism is a good thing and not just a relic of old times needs to be proven

This whole comment is pretty telling, but not in the way you'd imagine.

content-less snarks are at least equally telling

> In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals.

1. Personally, I consider that step to be a good one. I'll put that off as poor phrasing, because otherwise I'd have to assume you'd prefer it to have stayed an elite game.

2. I don't see how that was inevitable. The opening-up of education to a broader audience inevitably led to an "intellectually-poor culture"? I don't buy that, there's a bigger story to tell here.

Well, I would make a distinction between “removing barriers to entry” and “discarding values in order to appeal to the user/customer.” I see the former as a good thing and the latter as a deeply bad one.

There’s a difference between allowing anyone qualified to attend your institution _and_ restructuring the values of your institution to match the most lucrative market segment. Universities today are multi-billion dollar organizations that functionally treat students like customers. Ergo you have academic values being slowly replaced by “is this valuable in the marketplace?”

Everything is framed in terms of economics because the average person just wants to get a good job. That’s understandable but doesn’t justify eliminating fundamentally important topics like literature or art or philosophy. Thus my decoupling suggestion.

> there’s a bigger story here.

Of course, but I can’t write a thesis on the past two centuries of western civilization in a HN comment.

If there's demand to studying the humanities, why can't the students pay for it?

You can say that the state should subsidize non-wealthy students.

But why? shouldn't they, especially, focus on providing for their family, and learn interesting things on the side, like everybody else ?

Could you please phrase more clearly that only rich people should have a right to self expression?

Making education available to everyone is a good thing. Lowering standards is not. If you go from having 10% of the population go to college to 40% average intellectual engagement probably goes up a little but the quality signal of a Bachelor’s degree becomes diluted to the point of non-existence.

Not anti intellectualism, simple fact. Look at the history of education, then the later opening up of universities.

Originally it was something more - to train the elite to be the elite that runs everyone's lives - i.e. run the world, get the attitude and to think. Philosophy is still a common choice here. Then wider education - and later university expansion was built on a different skill set, a different education for filling the factories. A worker, a (suitably compliant) citizen. Just about no one at all goes near philosophy.

Same name of "education", two entirely different results. Politicians have occasionally aspired to equalise those two regimes, or aspire to something a little higher, but rarely has that played out, and has never lasted.

Wait until you see the skew in the teaching and nursing industries. Oh, the horror.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar and especially not by posting flamewar tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21440369 and marked it off-topic.

97.5% of teachers are women?

In the US , only about 6% of nurses are male.

https://realmanswork.wordpress.com/2012/05/05/male-nurses-wo...

Its also telling that the male-dominance of long distance trucking (in air-conditioned trucks with power-steering) is in the same range, but not so much as a peep about that.

I think it depends on what circles you run in. I used to work in operations and there are definitely programs to get women in trucking, because for the employers it's a no brainer to get the potential labor pool to expand.

If the long distance trucking forums aren't peeping about this, maybe ask _them_ why?

I'm not in the USA, but is it common there for teachers to receive millions of dollars from venture capitalists?

That's not a questsion that should get directed at me.

Yes, it is indicative of societal issues that women outnumber men in lower pay, lower status careers like teaching and nursing whereas men outnumber women in higher pay, higher status careers like tech.

I would take strong exception your comment that teaching and nursing are "lower status" careers. My mother, grandmother, and grandfather all taught their entire lives and contributed greatly to society over the course of their lifetimes, and a college professor is a high status position by any objective measure. It's a position I would like to attain but never will because I simply don't have the time to put into it, and even though I have a good career in tech I wish I could follow in their footsteps at times.

Nursing also pays quite well -- perhaps not quite the level of FAANG salaries, but six figure salaries in nursing are not at all uncommon, and relative to the education required to get into that career it is a very good return on investment. Also, nursing is absolutely not a low status career by any metric I know of either.

You're trying to make a point, I get that -- and perhaps you could use other career fields to make it more legitimately, but the previous poster has a very good point as well. People gravitate towards careers that interest them -- my mother was never going to write software because she has no interest in that field, but she loved to teach and chose to do so her entire life. I love to teach as well, but I don't have the aptitude for dealing with an academic career.

To be clear, by lower status (and I said "lower", not "low", very specifically) I was not saying anything negative about those professions or the people who work in them. I was only referring to their status within society at the moment, in that they are not accorded great power or influence, or feted in the same way as e.g. tech entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers are. I think that nursing and teaching should be much higher status jobs than they currently are and I think their importance is undervalued, which frequently tends to be the case for professions dominated by women.

You mention college professor as a high status position, which I think supports the point I was making, as whilst the majority of school teachers are women, the majority of professors are men.

As to people gravitating towards careers that interest them, I think that is begging the question a bit, as it avoids considering why people gravitate towards the positions that they do. Are women more likely to go into nursing than into tech because of some intrinsic preference, or because nursing is much more frequently presented as an appropriate career path for them than tech, and they can currently see a lot more women doing that than applying to YC or whatever? I would suspect the latter.

Depends on the field. Many fields have more women as professors than men -- just anecdotally in my (admittedly small sample size) family more women have been professors than men.

Nursing, to me, is a relatively high status field that offers a good salary and a great deal of flexibility.

Maybe in the 50's we were telling women they could only be nurses or teachers, but that's really not been an issue for a lot of years. There are plenty of women entrepreneurs, and I know plenty of women engineers -- I've worked with them and for them, and they've worked for me over the years. While this doesn't fit the new narrative, I haven't seen anybody telling women they can't be engineers or whatever else they want to be for a long time now.

Low status isn't the same thing as low value. One of our big problems as a society is that educators don't get half the respect their position deserves.

I agree with you completely on that -- but even to call them low status is in my opinion simply inaccurate. Even teachers who aren't paid well are still not "low status" like a bartender or custodian or something that would more commonly (not saying I agree because I'm not a fan of such labels..) be considered a "low status" occupation.

One of the things I appreciate about Japanese society is the fact that pretty much anyone who has a profession is proud of their profession, is paid well for it, and it's generally not considered proper to look down on someone for their position. Everyone contributes to society and that's how it should be.

I think men dominate over both ends of the job market - the best and the worst jobs.

Men dominate fields that require physical labour (farm work, construction work), risk taking (soldier, fireman, policeman, professional driver), bad working conditions (mining, waste disposal), long separation from home (sailor, travelling salesmen).

Why are comparisons made only to the most desirable jobs while forgetting about the rest? I think feminists only have an issue with the top 1% of men, only care about equality with them.

Nursing is a high-pay job for its education and risk bracket. It's low pay compared to doctor, but there are other confounders like education required do get an MD license.

From what I can tell, YCombinator has 3 main purposes:

1. Teaching people that money is the only thing in the universe that matters

2. Starting companies, or whatever

3. Funding Hacker News

Well, in our modern age, we don't need YCombinator to do those things. You can learn (1) just by reading Hacker News comments, and people do (2) without YCombinator all the time. Therefore, we can replace YCombinator just by finding someone else to run Hacker News. But as it turns out, there's an innovative organization lobste.rs, that's willing to do just that. You can read more about why we don't need YCombinator in this book[1], written by one of the world's leading economists.

[1] amazon.com/dp/0140445684/

Huh? Lobsters doesn't replace HN. Not just in the obvious, practical sense that HN is 100x bigger on any metric than Lobsters, but also in a theoretical sense, because our definition of topicality is a strict subset of HN's. And we're not trying to replace HN. And we're not an organization, or even particularly organized. If you think HN should be replaced... maybe try doing that, rather than contributing to it?

(Context: I'm the admin of Lobsters.)

Some weird people out there

This totally misses out a very important point. Colleges are hedge funds with a school attached, and attached with the only goal of making the profits they make on their endowment tax-free.

Not just it's about signaling. It's also a tax avoidance scheme.

This world is so broken, not surprising the richest and smartest people i know never finished college (or finished a crappy one parents just forcibly sent them to) and never officially worked anywhere.

And worst part of it. Startups are also the same thing. Why startups in the "classic" (YC-sense) exist (or provide any advantage over what is derogatorily labeled "revenue business"), is the historically ultra low interest rates, which makes valuations vs EBITDA, which is an inverse of effective interest rate, absurdly high. Exiting at such a valuation is whole lot more attractive than just collecting profits by running a 'normal' business. And these ultra low interest rates are funded by robbing next generation of pensioners by printing money by the trillion: by robbing ourselves, just in the old age. It is also zero sum. Also a Ponzi scheme. Also a scam.

And there is no escape from that. All the world of ours would cease to exist if we one day stopped lying to ourselves. "Real" stuff ended with abolition of the gold standard, and no one wants to go back, because it was too bad, and that or Communism would be only alternatives. We better keep pretending things are alright.

If you're going to slice up universities by financial components, the university itself is a fairly large component (perhaps billions of dollars per year for some schools.) The income for the university proper (from research, tuition and fees, etc.) is often larger than endowment income. There's often also a fairly large real estate/land management component as well as a (basically professional) sports organization.

Universities differ from regular hedge funds in that they don't have the same sort of investors. In fact, because they're non-profit, they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment.

>they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the endowment.

This is same as saying that they exist for the illegal profit of their managers (laundering away the profits) rather than legal profit of their investors?

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