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Comment by pickdenis | Hacker News Reader

This sort of thing doesn't work at schools that don't have such a high bar of entry. Caltech can afford to treat their students like adults, because they're picked from the cream of the crop.

On the other hand, schools like the one I went to would have a horrible(r) matriculation rate if students were not forced to attend certain classes. It infuriurates me (and I think students who want to fail should be allowed to fail), but ultimately it's a product of the financial incentive structure; more graduates = more $$$.

And forcing attendance of some classes does indeed increase the likelihood of certain borderline students graduating, nobody can deny that.

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Most of those third-tier schools shouldn't exist in the first place. Immature, undisciplined students are just accumulating debt without learning much. They would be better off in community college or working for a while. Then once they gain a little more life experience some will figure out what they want to do and have enough motivation to return to school.

> Most of those third-tier schools shouldn't exist in the first place

I disagree. I was offered admission to zero first rate schools, two second rate schools ($$$$$$ tuition), and my backup which is a third rate school (which I am attending for free).

If my backup school didn't exist, I would either be without a degree, or my parents would have a significant dent in their retirement. I'm willing to put up with the BS of third rate schools so that I can at least have a degree and not be scalped, thank you very much.

I'm grateful that my third rate school exists, no matter how shitty it is.

I will grant you, however, that no school should knowingly take $$$$$ from students and give them an useless degree. But a CS degree? It's pretty cool that I can get that from any school and it's the "same" level of degree whether it's from Caltech or Arizona State.

Well put, thank you.

I disagree. I went to the University of Canterbury (the New Zealand one), the bar to entry was literally to pass your high school exams.

We were treated like adults, and attendance was entirely optional for most lectures and tutorials. If you failed a paper because you didn't go to any lectures, that was your problem.

I don't think you're disagreeing with me here. It's just that your school doesn't care that much if students fail because of their own negligence. Mine does, because that looks bad or something.

I totally agree with your school's stance, but I acknowledge tha the current financial incentive structure prevents my school from having the same.

If you fail out, it's not just your problem though. It's also the taxpayers who paid for the school that the student wasted.

That remains true whether that's a Scandinavian model of fully-paid schools, a US public university model of a partially taxpayer funded & partially student funded or even a private university if it ultimately results in a taxpayer funded loan forgiveness or other subsidy.

Rate of dropouts is probably priced in. Plenty of people in the U.S. drop out of public education before they've completed it as we..

> Caltech can afford to treat their students like adults, because they're picked from the cream of the crop.

The cream in terms of demonstrated capacity for academic performance, which probably has very little correlation to readiness to be treated as an adult. There selection criteria is why they can afford to have rigorous coursework as the basic freshman core, but not why their decision to treat the young adults attending as adults works.

If anything, that policy is part of the selection system: the people that aren't ready for that treatment don't cause problems for other people as much as they would in other systems, they just fail out fairly quickly.

> has very little correlation to readiness to be treated as an adult

My words may have been misleading. What I'm trying to say is the kind of student that gets admission to Caltech is not the kind of student to neglect going to class out of laziness or whatever and fail out because of that.

> is not the kind of student to neglect going to class out of laziness or whatever and fail out because of that.

Well, I was. I tried repeatedly to skip class and still pass. It did not work. The low point was finals week, first semester, sophomore year. I was looking at flunking out. I had serious pain in my gut from stress.

I squeaked by.

That was it for me. I decided that I was never again going to miss a lecture, always take notes properly, never again skip homework (doing homework was not required), and I would master every single homework problem on time.

That worked for me. I started getting B's, eventually turning into A's.

Virtually all universities in Sweden do the same, and it works fairly well even in those with a very low bar of entry. And while our universities are not for profit they still do get funding based on number of students who complete courses. Do we really want tons of unmotivated students in the classrooms?

I don't understand how not tracking attendance is treating adults like adults. Your workplace will track your attendance until you retire. It's pretty normal.

Just because a student has issues with discipline or motivation I shouldn't let them fail. Tracking attendance improves academic results so I'm not sure what the advantage is to not tracking it.

Workplace attendance tracking is certainly not universal.

When I teach classes, if a student does not perform the requisite work to complete the course, I’ve no interest in their success. I am an instructor, not a motivator.

For the vast majority of jobs being absent a full work week without approval means you don't have a job the next week. Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed? It has nothing to do with adulthood.

And why do we need instructors? Let's just give each student some textbooks and their exam schedule. If they can't succeed we're not interested in their success.

The Darwinist argument can always be used to withdraw any and all levels of support. You can't use it to justify just the level of support you prefer.

In a job, you are being paid to perform a service. If you take the money and do not perform the service, you can expect negative consequences.

As a college student, you are paying to receive a service. The college fulfilled their obligation that you paid for. Your only obligation is to pay the bill that you agreed to. You are not obliged to make use of the services provided.

It's not the same situation at all.

So the adult argument has fell through. Now it's about being a customer.

Service providers can fire customers. If you pay for membership of a club but never attend functions, the club will end your membership.

If the service aims to provide a community or is invested in the success of its customers then it should fire customers who are not invested in their own success.

Not to mention how many students are not customers. They are sponsored by parents and scholarships and heavily subsidized. All these stakeholders have a vested interest in academic success. Tracking attendance is better for all of them.

If Caltech isn't the place for you, that's fine - there are many other choices. It was the place for me.

The adult argument didn't fall through. If you pay a psychologist for an appointment and you don't show up the psychologist will happily arrange another appointment and gladly receive the money. You are comparing a job to university but they are not comparable in this way.

The adult argument has absolutely fallen through because adults' attendance is tracked in another situation. So it's not a matter of being adult. It's a matter of what the specific relationship is of the student to the university.

It's ironic you mention psychologists. Therapists, personal trainers, life coaches, and other 1-to-1 service providers are the most likely to fire a customer for not attending. I personally know someone whose vocal coach made an ultimatum about attendance and ended up firing the customer. This is all very much adult.

In the end it's the sad consumerization of higher education in America. The pricing makes students so bitter as to demand "better service" rather than "better education". A university is more like a job in most of the world.

> For the vast majority of jobs being absent a full work week without approval means you don't have a job the next week.

College isn't a job for the student, it's a training and certification program that the student is paying for. The accreditation agencies that validate that the program is appropriate for the certifications being offered generally do not require attendance tracking, because regularity of attendance isn't what is being certified.

> Why does being an adult university student mean you can be absent for months and still succeed?

Attendance tracking in schools for children serves a number of purposes related to the fact that the students are children, including that students are not entrusted to review the syllabus and evaluate the level of engagement required for success on their own. Most students can't be absent for months and succeed, and if they try they will fail. Attendance tracking isn't needed for that if your assessment, grading, and academic standards are working properly (and attendance tracking doesn't fix the problem if they are not.)

> And why do we need instructors?

Because those are among the educational resources students are paying for (though there are universities where that is less the case than traditional universities, such as the competency-based WGU, which has won high praise from many corners.)

> This sort of thing doesn't work at schools that don't have such a high bar of entry.

This was the policy at the community college I went to. No one took attendance, and it was the students' responsibility to make sure they did the work and prepared themselves for exams if they chose not to show up.

Other elite schools take attendance and don't have an Honor System.

One interesting consequence of this is the faculty and students become collaborators rather than adversaries.

What elite institutions take attendance?

While I was at UChicago, we had courses with a participation grade - so attendance was effectively taken whether or not a teacher recorded it every class.

At LSE, they used iClickers while I was there for a few lecture hall courses. At least one (LSE100) requires attendance unless one wants to miss their chance of getting a First on the module.

I think adults should be treated like adults, no matter the bar for entry into whatever organization they're part of.

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