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Comment by m000 | Hacker News Reader

> as employers embrace new skills-based certifications, many students may question the value of the traditional four-year degree

Of course employers will embrace skills-based certifications, as they essentially offload the cost of any specialized training to the employee. Until now, it was not uncommon for the employer to pay (directly or indirectly) for the additional training.

But I'm not sure if getting a specialization certification without having a solid background on the topic is a good idea. It will be like the hordes of self-taught plugin programmers that made the Wordpress platform a liability to run.

In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree. The problem is its price. Pretending that the price can't be lowered, so we have to investigate alternative modes of higher education, is both untruthful and undemocratic.

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It may well be impossible to walk back what has happened to universities. Large institutions move slowly. There are too many stakeholders. Even when they can change, it's inevitable that forces will resist the change, resulting in half-measures.

So it may well be more expeditious to start over. There are many other models, and if nothing else, whatever success those models have will provide more capacity. That may also draw away students and force them to lower prices.

It still won't be easy. The price rise is driven in part by a mythos about the value of the four-year degree. People will continue to see education in any alternative as "lesser". And it doesn't have to be "lesser". I am a big fan of the work being done at Signum University, which has been working for years to establish an online model that's more than just a MOOC. It's actually closer to what a liberal arts education was supposed to be, the thing that gave four-year universities such prestige for producing well-rounded students. They don't teach computer science; they teach literature. And that means teaching dialogue, discussion, and insight, rather than being a glorified vo-tech school with a bunch of humanities thrown in. I'd love to see CS education move to a place where it taught how to craft software rather than teaching us to be mechanics.

Even when that happens it will be seen as "lesser" for a long time. We use the four-year school as a marker that the student can at least jump through the hoops, speak and write at least marginally competently, and can do the mechanical, testable aspects of the job. It doesn't actually do that very well, but people think it does, and don't believe anything else can.

> So it may well be more expeditious to start over. There are many other models, and if nothing else, whatever success those models have will provide more capacity. That may also draw away students and force them to lower prices.

Don't you think the process of starting over is already underway? We've ha alternate training and evaluation methods (certifications, MOOCs, and vocational schools) for a long time. What do you mean by "start over" in this context?

What I mean is something that receives more of the cachet of universities. As you say, we've had MOOCs and similar for a long time, but you're still going to have a hard time being employed with just that, especially for the best-paying jobs. They connote somebody who can do mechanical work but without creativity or communications skills.

My suggestion would be to promote those "soft" skills without the overhead of overhead of buildings, a football team, dining halls, etc. You can discuss literature, history, writing, etc. online almost as well as you can do it in person. Those are the things that differentiate a prestigious 4-year degree from a vo-tech or 2-year degree, and it's the prestige that has ultimately driven people's willingness to pay so much for university. (Well, that and some dishonesty and poorly-thought-out policy when it comes to student loans.)

The prices are high because Universities nowadays are run (more or less) as enterprises. Starting over without changing that, won't lower the prices. It will just increase the profit margins.

The article author seems to be under the impression that professors have a strong say on how the universities are run. They don't. And my feeling is they will have an even less significant role if we start over.

There are many more problems with CS degrees that just their price.

Would anyone here be comfortable running a WP plugin from the average 4 year CS grad? It is rare to find a CS grad who can write production code right out of college.

Let’s be clear, skills based certs are terrible at measuring things. You know what else is a terrible skills based test? A 4 year CS degree. I’ve interviewed a number of degreed working programmers who can’t solve even basic interview questions. Not gotcha questions, not difficult algorithms, but basics (read a file, sort a list of words, etc).

There’s lots of ways to learn, and this kind of talk just adds another barrier to people coming from non-traditional backgrounds. I understand this, because, as a self taught engineer, I’ve been the person at the table listening to engineers talk about how important a CS degree is and how you just need one.

Every time you make the point that you absolutely need a CS degree you’re telling someone who learned via another avenue that they aren’t good enough. At a time when we want more diversity and inclusion in software this message is the wrong message.

We need to think about how to bring education to more people through channels that work for them instead of telling them to fit themselves into a box that was designed for someone else.

> In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree. The problem is its price.

It can be both.

> In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree. The problem is its price.

I don’t know. The piece of paper is worth more than I paid for it, but that’s just an issue of employers gate keeping.

If I think back to every course I took in college I would say all but maybe 4-5 were a waste of my time. All these ancillary required courses so that I can receive a “well rounded” education that I needed to get a job, but didn’t actually want to take.

Even those 4-5 useful courses were woefully out of date. I could have done a better job learning that material with 6 months on Pluralsight or some other learning platform.

> In the end, the problem is not the value of the four-year university degree.

It's not worth it IMO, even if education is virtually free here on the better side of the big pond.

Even at 0 EUR, it's still a lot of time and effort that could be focused much more effectively.

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