Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

You could argue that we could use better schools or schools that have more of a focus on subjects needed by a modern workforce. But there's no real shortage of colleges and universities. Yes, existing universities come with lots of legacy entanglements (which can be good as well as bad) but for the most part you're probably better off investing in those schools than tearing down and starting from scratch on a prairie somewhere.

View on HN

When a school rejects qualified applicants because there are too many, doesn't that indicate a shortage of that kind of school?

No, it might indicate a lack of demand for that particular qualification.

No, because school prestige is a positional good. This is like saying you can address the shortage of Olympic gold medals by just manufacturing tons of them.

But the point of school prestige, at least in tech, is to assess skill. If the available pool of raw talent is larger than can be funneled through prestigious schools, then there is a need for more schools.

Again, just substitute the words.

But the point of Olympic medals is to assess skill. If the available pool of talented athletes is larger than the number of gold medals, then there is a need for more gold medals.

brilliant analogy

I think the point people are missing is that you don't need more gold medals. Rather, the people "hiring" athletes need to recognize that for many purposes the difference between gold and silver and bronze and first and second runner up to bronze is trivial and possibly arbitrary, especially in situations where outcomes are not nearly as easily quantified as in an athletic competition.

Also gold medals aren't being used as hiring criteria for technical careers.

People don't go to these universities for prestige's sake, but for what prestige gets them. It's not really about the gold medal (for the vast majority), it's about being an elite athlete (i.e., being generally healthy and physically capable of impressive feats) and having the security to practice the discipline you love. Knowing that, you would build a network of schools that meet the full need of potential elite athletes, rather than rely on a handful of clubs and coaches. Which is exactly what we (and China, and the Soviet Union) did.

People derive value from a higher education beyond just prestige. A 100% prestige item like a medal is different.

True, but there is also the skills you learn, which are in unlimited supply.

Different fields have different balance between these two things.

It’s not obvious this smallness serves any functional purpose. Two (U of T, Mcgill) Canadian schools have extremely good international reputations and serve more than the entire Ivy League. U of T alone educates more than the whole Ivy League.

http://induecourse.ca/the-bottleneck-in-u-s-higher-education...

>a shortage of that kind of school

"That kind of school" is (call it) a Top 10 school in a given field. And there is always going to be a shortage of slots at Top 10 schools whether you have 1,000 schools or 10,000. What potentially makes sense is investments in relevant subject areas in schools that aren't in the Top 10 but are in the Top 100 so they're functionally less distinguishable--except in prestige perhaps--though arguably that's already the case. In the US, cost aside, a qualified applicant can already get into a "good" school.

There may be a problem once you look at the social and economic structures that encourage students to apply to these schools.

For schools, like Harvard and Yale, isn't a large part of the value they provide to students derived from the school's network of alumnus and the prestige the school's name holds? If so, don't these schools derive a large part of the value they offer from their exclusivity?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com