Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

> That's why I'm leading UnCollege: a social movement empowering individuals to take their education beyond the classroom. Imagine if millions of my peers copying their professors' words verbatim started problem-solving in the real world. Imagine if we started our own companies, our own projects and our own organizations. Imagine if we went back to learning as practiced in French salons, gathering to discuss, challenge and support each other in improving the human condition.

Dale grossly overestimates how smart most 18-year-old college students are. If you want to make college obsolete, start by making high school harder, to prepare them to be independent at adult age. Saying "no college" to the students who actually need it is detrimental. After attending college for a year which ended a few weeks ago (yes, I dropped out), I can make a decent guess that throwing many of them in the wild will not yield the incredible results that Dale postulates (and I would, in a perfect world, wish for.)

He says it himself: "sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college" ... yet (1 – 0.36) = 64% of college students do show an improvement.

I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people (edit: and those that are skipping college themselves), so perhaps he has a heavy confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.

Your thoughts are welcome.

I'd imagine that Dale talks and hangs out with pretty smart young people, so that there is a big confirmation bias that doesn't consider the 90% of everyone else.

Or does he? The stuff he says is pretty similar to people I knew who I didn't think were very bright. But who doesn't think they're smart? Everyone thinks what they're doing is the right thing.

And at age 19 half the people I knew had opinions about everything, from education, to how we should really go about curing cancer, to how we could have won the Vietnam War in just a few years.

19 year olds with opinions that have little basis in reality is not a new phenomenom -- although of course there are also some genuinely bright ones.

Yeah, but he is part of the Thiel Fellowship, which I tend to see as a pretty damn smart group of young people. And I know Dale and know that he talks to these "moving forward" type of teens.

On the other hand, I'm yet another 19-year-old with an opinion. Yes, I think I know something about what the right decision for college is (and I think it's completely individual), so perhaps I just fall under that category and the above should just be ignored. Not that I think so, of course.

I don't know Dale, but reading that article leads me to different conclusions about him than you probably already have. :-)

I will say this for starters. I thought that college was actually one of the most open environments I've ever been in. Moreso than pre-college education. Moreso than working at a VC-backed startups. Moreso than working in corporate America. Probably the only time I had significantly more freedom was taking some time off between jobs.

When I see statements like, "Failure is punished instead of seen as a learning opportunity" -- I see immaturity. He punishes himself for failure. I've seen it as a learning opportunity since junior high at least (I think this something athletics really instils in children, although certainly not exclusive to athletics).

In any case, he sounds like a friend, and I don't want to rant on a friend, especially if he's not here to defend himself. I look forward to what he can do over the years. Maybe he'll prove me wrong.

"He punishes himself for failure."

Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.

I'm not saying this is inherently good or bad either. If you're a surgeon or an airline pilot, your room for experimentation & outside the box thinking is slim to nil. But actively discouraging an aspiring hacker, developer, entrepreneur etc. from experimentation (I.E. a high rate of failure before success) is a surefire way to diffuse the creative process, in my mind.

Disagree. In many cases academia DOES actively punish failure, through negative feedback mechanisms involving grades, comments on papers/essays and the like that subjugate "out-of-the-box-thinking" in favor of a certain theme or buzzword a professor wants to hear, what his or her political or economic viewpoint is, etc.

I think you're conflating two things here: negative feedback and biased evaluation. Two very different things.

Regarding negative feedback -- it's not failure, it's feedback. And that's what I mean by the immaturity aspect. When I was a kid, I'd cry when I lost at chess. As I got older I usually learned more from my losses than my wins. They were no longer just failures, it was a chance to improve. Throughout school I felt the same way. Comments on papers/essays and grades I used to make myself better. I appreciated them.

The biased evaluation isn't unique to college. In fact its a pretty major part of life in general. You're going to have to deal with it in businss, dealing with VCs, dealing with spouses, banks, employees, etc... If you can figure out a way to remove it, I'd love to see it.

Regarding out of the box thinking, I generally found it well received. Especially in CS. But I guess YMMV.

A high college GPA sends me a very clear message: this candidate has a proven ability to identify what dozens of different professors and TAs wanted, and deliver it.

When I was 19, I didn't see it as a valuable skill, I just thought it was obnoxious bullshit. Today, I see it as so valuable that when faced with a pile of potential candidates, nearly everybody who graduated magna or summa gets at least a phone interview.

I also have trouble accepting statements about college from someone who attended one for less than a year. I don't think there is a set-in-stone college experience, and it seems from his article that his experience differed sharply from mine.

(The differences between good and bad colleges are, of course, usually missing from these sorts of discussions...I have difficulty taking seriously anyone who can critique or discuss "college" as if it were one monolithic program.)

+1 to that.

College is not to teach you "how to be successful" or "become a better coder". In this case, it's about giving you the tools to learn to think. (...I think this doesn't apply for med school, though)

There's also the huge network of people you meet that help you later in your career. I've lost track of the number of people I know who have been given job offers from old friends/fraternity brothers/faculty they kept in touch with.

I have my current job because of an alumni from my school. There's a lot more to the college experience than just the diploma.

As kenjackson notes below, college-age students typically have everything figured out. As a sort of hangover from the teenage years, the world is astonishingly simple (the story of Asteroid Boy comes to mind) and traditional institutions are worthless. As a "smart" kid, I suffered from this myself.

The problem with the UnCollege movement is that it might disqualify a lot of smart students from graduate study, which IMO is where the teenage hubris starts melting away. Spend a few years in a PhD program, and even if you don't finish, you'll realize that the world is a lot more complicated than you imagined, and there is a lot of advanced knowledge out there that requires a period of dedicated study with a mentor. You might not need graduate school for it, but it's a structured environment for those who aren't fortunate enough to be adopted by a VC.

I would agree, but I think we are all on the same page on this subject (with Dale, that is). At least, he touches on the fact that students on the med track shouldn't really take the UnCollege route since there is intrinsic knowledge you pretty much need to be an active participant in the medical community in whatever capacity. (Around the end of the article.)

But yes, if you're saying that doing more education opens you up to more than just knowledge, but a realization that stuff is really a lot harder than you thought, definitely ++ on that.

Of course, there are things which are better suited for jumping right in—I'm thinking areas of work where experience can teach more than learning, like startups. But I'm biased.

In any case, I think with every article that's sensationalized like this, we can all agree that the headline sucks.

There is a growing dissonance in college: one group of people are intent on having a career in the academics. The other are getting their bachelor's as only for the fact that it's the new high school diploma: just a necessity to keep up.

This leads to confusion for a lot of young people. The ones who are more ambitous will have thoughts that college isn't enough for them, and will consider their dissection that college is a beauracratic sheepfarm to be brilliant, and they will have convincing thoughts of leaving which is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because there is another realm which a lot of these young people might find a lot of challenging enjoyment and that is the academic world. Unfortunately again, though, the first two years of college have been dumbed down to accomodate the new trend of having college not mainly being for aspiring academics.

I have to wonder that if these students stuck it out (and perhaps with the choosing of a rigorous major) they'd find their life leading a whole new direction by the end of their upper division courses.

Why pick French salons as the model for future progress, why not the Royal Society (which has probably done as much for "improving the human condition" as any other body). Maybe it's because the founders of the Royal Society were closely linked to Oxford and Cambridge?

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