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Comment by cracker_jacks | Hacker News Reader

Professor Galloway also said:

--- We get a lot of ego gratification every time our deans stand up in front of the faculty and say, “This year, we didn’t reject 85 percent of applicants; we rejected 87 percent!,” [...] That is tantamount to the head of a homeless shelter bragging about turning away nine of ten people who showed up last night. ---

There's an opportunity here to scale education from institutions all over the world to a level never possible before. Well...it was possible for many years. But the incentives for the institutions commit to it never appeared until now.

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Or tantamount to an institution trying to preserve the actual quality and value of the education by avoiding grade inflation and watering down of material. Many homeless shelters have standards and will reject people who are a threat to the quality of their environment - there really are students who are the (learning) equivalent.

This is a hard problem. But the mantra "scale education" ignores the quality side, and somebody who is shuffled through a "scaled" experience without personally investing and then given whatever credential at the end is still not actually competitive for a job and isn't being done any favors - they've just invested a lot of time in something without much personal value. What's worse, they've diluted the perception and thus value of the educational experience for anyone else who attended the same institution, even those who did take it seriously and learn.

People still send rejections for bad reasons (ego, etc.), and the cherry-picked 85/87% example seems illustrative of that. But the answer to education isn't scale - it's quality and specialization. Not everyone really wants an academic experience, as anybody who has spent serious time at a school can attest to (throwaway because I'm in that group).

Going to have to disagree. High school education in the US (and I suspect in many other countries) is done by folks some of whom shouldn't be allowed within 300 yards of a high school. I'm seeing it play out with my own kid. Math and chemistry teachers sucks beyond belief this year (and they can't be fired for bad performance - unions), so we hired tutors who fill in over Skype. This happens every year, with different subjects. This is not something a lot of other people can afford to do. Do you reject all those folks for "quality" reasons? Or do you admit the reality that the expensive US high school system is not where it needs to be and try to salvage kids harmed by it by letting more people in and offering remedial classes? You can still maintain quality by doing exams later and getting rid of people who can't pull their weight. Where I have problem is when they won't even give people a chance, even though doing so is technically possible in year 2020, through university administered MOOCs and such.

There are absolutely terrible problems of inequality through nearly all levels and areas of society. Unequal opportunities, inherited economics, social class - these things harm lots of lives.

But no, it is not realistic to expect higher education to magically fix all of this at the end of the pipeline by simply having a wider mouth. That's going to/already has significantly harmed the actual value (and signaling value) of a higher degree. It just doesn't fix the problem to more widely apply a treatment that only works when certain prerequisites are in place - competitive programs look for those prior experiences because they really do prepare you for deeper study.

There of course should be (and are) undergraduate institutions that are not that competitive, whose charter is to educate those with relatively less opportunity earlier in life. The 85/87% numbers in the original parent comment however suggest that they are discussing either a competitive department or graduate program within a university - and their charter is and should be to advance the truth and quality of their field.

In other words - yes, give folks a chance. But don't expect higher education to fix a bunch of upstream socioeconomic problems (try to get primary education fairer first), and "give folks a chance" means "broad access to general undergraduate education" (and then still some standards, i.e. being willing to fail folks or guide them to alternatives), not "open all the gates to everything and scale it up."

> That's going to/already has significantly harmed the actual value (and signaling value) of a higher degree.

This is a ridiculously elitist, and unsustainable view, IMO. We should err on the side of giving people opportunity to succeed, rather than discard them. These are _people_ remember. Just because they were screwed over by the teacher union, they do not cease to be people, and some fraction of them might go on and achieve great things if given an opportunity. There will always be "socioeconomic" problems. This is further exacerbated by underdevelopment of vocational education in the US. In USSR/Russia, unless you actually want to study, you didn't make it past grade 9. As a result for the last 2 years of school it was no longer "fashionable" to be a shithead - all the shitheads were gone.

The dilution you're so worried about won't happen if it's structured like a MOOC. In fact the MOOC could (and probably should) be administered concurrently with the last couple of years of high school.

In the USSR (and Russia as it was in the 90's I don't know about now), the failure of high schools to provide sufficient education for "hard" higher education was implicitly acknowledged, and there were multi-year, free mail-based education programs administered by top universities which would, if you put in the effort, give you a better shot of passing the entrance exam, even if you're in a village high school where the physics teacher can't tell a Joule from a hole in the ground.

You'd receive printed materials and homework in the mail, and you'd be expected to study on your own (or perhaps with a bit of help from your high school math and physics teachers, ours were happy to help), and complete the homework. The explicit goal was to prepare you for the entrance exam, so it was kind of pointless to cheat or slack off.

These programs did not have limits on enrollment, but they'd get pretty darn hard towards the end, so a lot of people would wash out.

Given that US high school system as a rule sucks major balls for most people (in spite of being very expensive), I'm advocating that this understanding be formalized, and the first, optional, year is added to the higher education curriculum to focus on fixing that damage, followed by an in-person entrance exam. Feel like you can do the exam without extra preparation? Proceed straight to the exam. Feel like enrolling sooner? Take the courses in addition to your last year of high school.

Sadly, I can say from experience that the unsustainable view is that we should err on the side of admitting people regardless of demonstrable skills or relevant background. They are of course still people - but people who may need something other than higher education, and again it is not on higher education to fix all the ills and injustices of society (it can of course help - but it can't solve upstream issues).

Re: the rest - read my upthread comments, suffice it to say I am supportive of broad opportunity and personally am a fan of MOOCs. But there's a difference between making material available and providing a supportive curated learning experience (which is what people expect when admitted into a university, and is essentially necessary for a research environment), and for the latter holding students accountable to standards really does matter.

It sounds like you have some interesting ideas that could be applied towards improving primary education (intermingling with MOOCs, etc.). That's great - as I said in my first response to you, advocate for those (I also agree that vocational education could help - that's part of what I was hinting at with "specialization" and "alternatives"). I particularly like your description about how it really did gate on the actual difficulty - that's pretty infrequent in these initiatives from what I've seen. That plus a robust test at the end could lead to a trustworthy credential used to apply to future opportunities.

Research institutions and competitive/graduate programs need to maintain quality in order to advance their field, and need to be selective to do so. The best fix for inequality is to fix it at the source, but to maintain an insistence of the actual value and integrity of the material. It hurts both individuals and the system to dilute and give people participation badges for passing through, and that is the approach I have more commonly seen when people push for "broad accessibility."

The key thing to understand is, primary education problems are not going to ever be fully fixed, irrespective of how much you spend. It just boils down to unequal distribution of talent. There will be a few truly excellent high schools (through a combination of chance and attracting better teachers just because they are already excellent) and a ton of crap ones that de-facto ruin people's lives today. So there should be more practical opportunities for those who want them to not fall through the cracks. All I'm arguing in favor of is that these opportunities are formalized as a gateway into higher education, rather than left for the kids themselves to figure out. I've been through such a program in early 90's, it works.

Crucially, I'm not arguing in favor of lowering the bar. If anything, making the mouth of the funnel much wider could _raise_ the bar instead as more talented kids will make their way through it. I'm arguing in favor of providing more structure and more targeted training to people who would currently fail to overcome the bar essentially due to random chance of having a shit math teacher in high school.

They _could_ in theory do self-directed learning, but without structure and a goal this gets old rather quickly and people give up.

I think we're actually overall aimed at similar things then, I'm just emphasizing the need for the integrity of university admissions processes as it's pretty easy to dismiss that as elitist gatekeeping as the initial excerpt in this thread somewhat did (and admittedly sometimes it is - but that is not its raison d'etre). Primary education will never be "fixed" - but it is the right place to try to make most of the progress needed on these underlying issues.

If what you're talking about is more (robust/tested) MOOCs as a way to qualify for higher education, more structure/accountability for self-directed learning/availability of material, and a wider funnel in terms of more vocational education/opportunities - I'm absolutely on board, and would see those as suitable improvements to primary education. I'm just giving you a heads up that, in the US at least, most actual initiatives that try to "spread opportunity" don't do any of those things (too much work/investment needed), but really do just push for lower bars in higher education (wider funnel in terms of "let more people in to the thing we're doing anyway") and result in dilution of material. And yes, that does harm the value of the degree, as demonstrated also by jobs now looking for graduate degrees when in past undergraduate would have sufficed.

This is absolutely an area where the US could stand to learn from the standards and practices of its global peers. Sadly that is unlikely in the current environment.

The quality issue will have to be addressed either way as an outcome of the current pandemic. Previously, there was no pressure to solve these accessibility issues because it was not necessary for the survival of the institution. In fact, the quote I mention shows that it better serves the institution to have exclusivity to improve branding.

Now with the pandemic, an institution's survival depends on this accessibility. And the bonus is that solution to this issue can greatly increase the accessibility to many more.

The quality issue is always the issue :) regardless of time or medium.

Certainly agreed that existing institutions (educational and otherwise) need to figure out how to effectively function remotely. Remote accessibility is a separate problem from scaling and reducing entry requirements - Harvard can (and likely will) have essentially the same students, just using Zoom rather than walking around campus.

And the point of my argument is that the main goal of admissions requirements and selectivity is in fact pedagogical (supporting an effective learning environment). Yes, there are branding/ego aspects, but again this is not a simple discrete 0/1 problem. The space is continuous, and "scale" is simply not the answer.

If your goal is making great knowledge readily available, then MIT OCW and many other existing MOOCs have really already solved that. They do it by simply putting it out there, but not formally evaluating/crediting participation. This is all great, and is I believe the right way to scale accessibility without diluting the focused experience of the institution itself.

I think the dissonance you’re seeing here is between the signalling and human capital hypotheses of education. Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses. These are all signs that lend a lot of support to the signalling hypothesis: that the purpose of education is to signal one’s desirable qualities to future employers, rather than to acquire those qualities in the first place.

Scaling access to bachelor’s degrees all over the world will only increase the demand for masters and PhDs.

Thereby increasing corporate profit at expense of the worker and taxpayers. Moreover, it benefits the Ivy League at the expense of all other universities. There’s a need to differentiate and the Harvard name becomes the criteria rather than the education or diploma itself.

==Spend some time around a lot of universities and you’ll see it in action. Rampant cheating, “bird” courses, mass dropping of challenging courses.==

You make a great point. In my experience some of this is intended thinning of certain majors. For example, P-meds at my university always got a kick at how many people gave up that major after their first Zoology class.

Those kids now have to catch-up in order to complete their art history or general business major that they never wanted in the first place. The whole process we have created needs to be re-evaluated.

This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve. And many they're slowly (re-)realizing that they can hire inquisitive folks with a good work ethic but no bachelor's and get just as good results, that the signal doesn't have as much value as they thought.

What would be worthwhile is if employers identified what skills or knowledge or experience they actually wanted and figured out how to both test for those (and not just trust the degree-granting system) and train for those (because the degree-granting system doesn't reliably supply it).

>This is, of course, the employers' problem to solve.

This is difficult for them to do so, due to stupid laws. If they had a hiring exam, and it happened to show a certain race performing worse on it, they would get sued for racism and lose. So instead, they just do the safe thing, and let collages filter out the undesirables for them.

I believe this isn't true in the US at least for the following reasons:

- Many employers do in fact have hiring exams: see Triplebyte, HackerRank, etc. in our own industry, but also civil service exams etc.

- Colleges themselves rely on exams (like the SAT) with known racial disparities in scoring for admission.

- Colleges completion rates vary by race.

So one would think that employers would already be sued for racism if that were possible.

(But, perhaps the argument is that employers want to filter people by race, and they wouldn't be able to do so as easily with a hiring exam as via indirect means like recruiting from certain colleges.)

This is especially tragic given the variation in career opportunities from different colleges. Many of the most highly compensated, high-upside careers are basically only accessible to graduates of top-tier institutions. Particularly in consulting and finance.

In my experience talent is way more evenly distributed than the recruiting practices of some industries would indicate. The best people whom I've worked with went to a mix of extremely fancy and very ordinary colleges. A few didn't go to college at all. It's a real shame.

If what you need is an infrastructure for distributing lectures and grading exams, a university is overkill. The real function of a university is community. Communities that concentrate serious students and expect high performance from them are different in important and desirable ways from randomly sampled groups of 18-year-olds.

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