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Comment by simmanian | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to engage in a zero sum game of fighting for the "fair" share of the pie, but I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other. I honestly think we are already headed in the direction of providing a more open education through the internet. COVID has probably accelerated the process.

I hope we can find ways to lift each other up rather than bring each other down.

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This scarcity problem was the issue I had with the free college proposals last year. It basically proposed that we should make everyone professionals. But, this isn't possible! For every manager, there are 10 workers. "Working class" jobs are necessary. The solution should not be give everyone an escape from hell, it should be make the jobs less hellish. Better wages, better healthcare, more respect and dignity overall.

Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".

> Saying that everybody should not go to college might at first seem elitist, but I think its elitist to presume that college is the only path, where people demonstrate their "merit".

This seems self evident to me and I'm always surprised at how much pushback people get for saying that sending 100% of kids to college isn't some especially useful magic bullet.

Personally I have a college degree and have been through trade schools in two different industries. The trade schools were much cheaper, much shorter, and vastly more useful to my earning potential than going to college. I loved the college experience but it felt much more like a middle class luxury than an economic necessity.

Out of curiosity, what were the trade schools/industries?

All of them. There's a huge problem with folks not getting into the trades. HVAC, electrical, framing, millwork, machining, masonry, plumbing, welding, etc etc. I live in a small town. A young local guy started up a small plumbing company about five years ago with contemporary thinking, branding, marketing, etc. He's a super sweet dude that volunteers a lot of time, runs some community facebook groups, etc. Today he's got 50 employees operating out of two locations.

Shit's there for the taking.

Another question from me: what do you make of the "its backbreaking work" argument? That is, trades are more precarious as you age. Its easier to sit in a chair at 50 than to hunch and squat and crawl.

You sit in a chair until 50, you'll have a heart attack. You do physical work until 50, you'll have an injured spine. Take your pick. Wage labor wasn't designed to be healthy.

It's definitely a factor, some more than others. Unfortunately because the labor pool isn't replenishing like it used to, tradesmen are doing the heavy stuff much later in their career and taking larger tolls on their bodies.

Where is this the most true? I would imaging there is more trade worker scarcity in some places than others.

I don't know if it's bad everywhere but it's bad here in podunk USA. Weeks and weeks of lead time, no call backs, etc...

That's not how it works in other countries with free college. You have to pass admissions which are very competetive and obviously not everyone gets in.

It would be cool if we could do something like this - I think it would get a lot of political and financial pushback.

This is already the case. NY went tuition free for state schools for middle class income brackets, and admissions is still the same as it was in the past. I'm unsure where you got the idea that subsidized higher education meant that students didn't have to meet academic targets for admission.

Is there not pushback on the means by which they determine who gets in? SAT, grades, the income bracket window, etc? If one barrier is removed (tuition), it seems reasonable to get the idea that who gets in will receive even more focus.

The problem is that status is positional. Everyone wants to have more of it and it is inherently scarce.

10 people don't need 1 manager. The company'd be best served if all 11 people worked and managed themselves, like adults.

Well, I think if large groups of people (companies) are collaborating, some degree of hierarchy should be maintained. While, yes, even if all employees are reasonable adults, it would still benefit their shared objective if there is structure in what they are working on, and when.

The 10:1 ratio I mentioned was just to illustrate that the free college proposal implicitly assumes but explicitly ignores a "natural hierarchy". I also think workplaces should be more egalitarian than they are now.

Especially if all of those people have education. Keeping worker count high by omitting their education is very wrong.

We are already approaching automation levels where people who are just workers are needed less and less.

By definition elite qualifications will always be scarce. Everyone can attend college, if we include things like community college. Not everyone can attend Harvard. Some community colleges may even be better at teaching, but they'll never have the prestige.

The question they’re asking is, does it need to be, or is this antiquated?

Is there a good reason to pit people against each other? Is it possible to provide a great education for everyone who wants one and meets some base qualification, etc.

I think the answer is pretty clearly that the best education, in many fields, will always require proximity and therefore scarcity. I just wrapped an OMSCS degree, and as much as I loved the program and the education, missing the on-campus experience definitely makes it a different thing.

Not because I learned any less of the material. More so because I walked away with very few relationships and very little spontaneous creativity amongst peers.

Some of that is on me for doing it while working full time, but it would’ve been hard regardless.

Many people consider those community aspects to be the some of the most valuable qualities of the college experience.

Credentials vs. education. Credentials are a positional good, education an intrinsic one. We've decided the two should be bundled together, but they don't have to be. Maybe they shouldn't be; that would be a much more interesting conversation to have.

For certain fields, it isn’t possible to get the education without going through the credentialing system or impossible to get a job for it.

Creating employees is not the primary goal of education. The goal is to create thinking individuals. We can't allow the education system to only serve the interests of the business community. It's clear that they limit education to the least amount of people, because an educated citizenry is very difficult to rule. Ignorance is being weaponized in a class war and education for all would take away that weapon.

The more people are educated the more likely or numerous the emergence of people like Einstein or newton. The more people are educated the more democratic society will be and the free-er we all will be. If a large part of society does not understand what's going on around the world then they have to take everything for granted that they have been told by tptb.

True, but these qualifications hold power only as long as people care about them. I believe the main benefit of attending these prestigious institutions is largely in networking -- getting the chance to know powerful people (some say this fact alone means our education system is failing greatly). But what happens when you have harvard on your resume but took all the lectures remotely? What happens when people realize you can do great and amazing things by taking courses on X online learning service and start building things? What happens when these people create a support network for other like-minded people?

I personally want to see it happen. There are ways we can win in life without bringing others down. Sometimes that means creating a new path.

Doing great and amazing things doesn't give you an exclusive, widely-recognized credential.

But I think it should!

Even "attending" is starting to matter less (see the sky-high graduation rates for these schools). An Ivy League undergraduate degree is best described a patent of minor nobility, honored by all Western bureaucracies including governments, NGOs, and corporations.

Online lectures might be able to scale, but communication platforms and social networks cannot.

I would say more than half of what you learn is from your peers. People who by design were already filtered to be at a high baseline of competence and are forced to go through the same curriculum in the same timeframe as you.

No professor or expert can explain a concept better than someone similar to yourself who recently figured it out. There's also an immense amount of camaraderie built from helping each other grow. All of this is lost when you're just one of millions watching a video where most of the public discussion is dumb.

A little artificial exclusivity isn't a bad thing.

I agree for the most part. I've met some of my best friends in college while working on lab assignments through the night. But I think that we can't form meaningful communities through online learning platforms only means there are a lot of improvements (=opportunities) to be made in the market.

> I believe the fundamental problem is that our education system as it exists today has immense scalability problems: it's built upon the idea of creating scarcity around qualifications and putting people against each other.

I’m not sure if it is a problem of the education system per-se or the downstream of higher education (i.e. labor market) being incredibly credentialist.

Let’s assume for a while the education itself is infinitely scalable and accessible. What remains for an education instituion would be the ability to grant a status to its graduates, and status is always bound to be a scarce good (if everyone is high status, no one is high status), which drives the zero-sum dynamics.

Therefore the problem is that high status education credentials predicts higher salary, in turn education institutions are bound to keep their status supply artificially restricted to preserve value and themselves profitable. (Not to mention gatekeeping that status supply is a valuable in itself).

So I think the root cause is labor market responding to status signals along with competence signals, in a ratio that changes from sector to sector.

I view that today's labor market and education system are interdependent on one another, so I don't think we disagree in that regard.

> Status is always bound to be a scarce good

I think this hits the core of the problem. The REAL problem is that these institutions are more or less made in our image. Many people want prestige, status, power, so people create institutions that have zero-sum dynamics. Some people observe that this is just how the world works and will always work. But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo. I believe we have the capacity to innovate for increased sustainability in our institutions and more importantly our lives.

> But I'd like to think such observation is more of a complacent justification for the status quo.

I don't think people who are merely responding to the game and people who would want the game to be sustained are exactly the same populations.

Even with that, I think moral failings alone might not explain what is going on. Detecting competence signals is hard. Even in occupations where skills are highly explicated (e.g. software engineering) interviews suck at being good classifiers of good future employees. In which case we fallback to available data such as credentials as a proxy, which is also not completely irrelevant. This doesn't mean some people are not going to be explicitly credentialist (Marisa Mayer comes to mind as a well know example), cronyist or nepotist at the expense of competent alternatives, but it means one of the ways to innovate is going to be through amplifying competence signals (e.g. github repos and other public work can be thought as one example to this).

Hmm, perhaps I should have elaborated more, because I never intended to say moral failings alone explains what's going on or even blame certain people. I believe that many institutions and systems created by people exhibit zero-sum dynamics partly because people just don't think there's a viable (competitive) alternative. Amplifying competence signals is certainly one way we could help change that.

I totally agree. If Ivy League colleges wanted to be truly diverse, and fair, there is a very simple solution: set a minimum bar in terms of things like grades, class rank, AP scores, and perhaps some objective measure of extracurricular activities. In very competitive schools, you'd still have many times the number of qualified than you do spots. So than you have 2 options: increase or class size, or take people at random. Of course, either of these options take away from the exclusivity of the institution in the first place, which really is the raison d'etre of the Ivy League.

Fairness in academics should be based on merit. Handing out tokens just codifies a belief that certain groups are inferior to others. The social justice rhetoric only exists to justify treating certain races and sexes as a disability

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