Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate | Hacker News Reader

Harvard and its peers should be embarrassed about how few students they educate

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41 pointsjaytaylor26 comments

The problem is that elite colleges aren't building the best education. They're building the most elite network of future leaders. Education in terms of content is all but free now. MIT, Stanford and others give away so much of their course materials. The one thing you can't replace is the connections and reputation. In this way you can't just keep bump up the number of students .

It's interesting how many people in the intellectual elite, otherwise, buy into "quality" as an explanation for the apparent success of elite education, overlooking selection biases as an explanation.

Education isn't a luxury good, and it shouldn't be treated like one. Education can and should be democratized without sacrifing quality.

Education is pretty well democratized but can be improved. Elite networks aren't and probably can't.

Educational Information has already been democratized by MIT Open Courseware, Khan, and others. But Education itself is an interactive human activity carried out by an expert professional. Some of those professionals will be better at educating than others, and people will compete for access to those better educators. There is nothing about Education as a profession that suggests it can be democratized, because the fundamental operational units (educators) are not scalable the way copying texts or videos is.

As a current university student, I am painfully aware that there are good educators, okay educators, and piss-poor educators, but I do think we can expand our pool of very talented educators by making the necessary investments and making teaching a more lucrative field.

The luxury good aspect is the tyranny of the normal curve - the best will always be more sought after. Decommoditization ensues. It is the demand which truly makes a luxury good.

Of course they do. They are the ones who benefit the most from the idea that an elite education is higher quality.

This rings true. Most of my friends now that I'm older are basically people I met at Uni or people I met through them. Kind of a weird thing to optimize for though.

I went to Random Public University. The contacts I made there are people who went to Random Public University. The people who go to Harvard make contacts who went to Harvard. If the people who went to Harvard are, on average, more valuable to have as contacts then the people I went to school with, then it makes perfect sense to optimize for that. The education you can get anywhere, but the valuable contacts you can't.

> Kind of a weird thing to optimize for though.

The part they left out is important: the endowment. They optimize for the endowment, and contributions towards it. “Elites” have the most money to contribute. It’s always about the money, of which Harvard has $40.9B.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University_endowment

Donors are about a quarter of the class, not all of it.

If you aren't paying, you're the product, per https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...

I would say that most research universities aren't in the business of "educating". They are in the business of credentialing more than anything else, as far as the benefit to students. The actual professors are often uninterested (or less interested) in teaching as compared to their own research/career. This isn't limited to just private institutions either. Big public research universities also don't do a great job at "educating". My feeling is that students by and large educate themselves, and learn that skill of learning in the process.

Regarding the article's main premise: Harvard's value is its existing network effect, which is a student body that is highly talented and selectively chosen (ignoring the discriminatory biases of "holistic admissions"). That student body makes the degree worth more than degrees from other universities. That's why high performing students continue to go there. If lower-quality students are admitted into the Harvard brand, the value of the degree goes down. That's a cost paid by higher-performing students whose merit gets diluted by lower-performing students. If Harvard just plainly educates more students, it will stop being Harvard since that name's weight and meaning will change.

As a fix to all this, what we really need is decentralization of education. That will allow students lower cost paths to education, greater choice in educational culture, and bring a focus back to teaching/learning rather than professors' research areas.

As i mentioned in a comment above, The article mentions that there were many very qualified candidates who are routinely rejected due to artificial scarcity and that selection among such high quality candidates was arbitrary in many cases. So i doubt, you would be surrounded by dumb students. I'm guessing smart students don't want to be surrounded by too many Jared Kusners or George Bushes.

If the students educate themselves, why do you need to decentralize anything?

That's a great question and I need to refine my thoughts here more. But my take is that we should separate out how teaching/learning occurs and how students are credentialed. We shouldn't have big institutions supplying solutions for all of these different pieces. We could also split up a "degree" into smaller chunks. Maybe I pay Coursera for a macroeconomics course and certification on that topic, but I pay Udemy for a calculus course and certification on that topic. Or maybe a different provider certifies me on a collection of topics to say that I am a ready practitioner of macroeconomics.

I could see decentralizing credentialing as working for that but well, good luck given issues with Goodhart's law let alone adoption with stubborn social institutions.

It's not as if Harvard has a special methodology that can't be copied. The exclusivity itself is much of their value. It gets them better students, professors, and donations.

My university copied MIT's CS curriculum back in the day, as did several other universities. Effectively that meant there was more MIT style education, but people still preferred to be part of MIT.

> The exclusivity itself is much of their value.

I think the author realizes this. The article is an attempt to shame them into giving up this value.

Smaller class sizes probably make a big difference too. The average class size at Harvard is 12. Average US kindergarten class is 21. So kids at Harvard can get a lot of tailored individual instruction. It's much easier for a prof to track 12 students than 200.

There is a phrase:

"He is well-schooled but poorly educated"

This is specifically and commonly referring to Ivy League grads.

A degree is a Bayesian result that might (or might not) indicate successful education. Thus being schooled and being educated are not the same thing. One is maybe the map to the other being the territory.

From hacker news circa 2019: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-uncharity-of-colle...

edX and MIT OCW exists. Can you get degrees? No, not other than little token certificates, but it hits the 80/20 curve on providing raw educational content. I'd would not be the first to echo the comments that the lecture material is very, very similar to other 'middle-of-the-road' universities

I think that if Harvard started admitting 10x, 100x the amount of students, the issue of unequal opportunity would not go away

I like to picture universities as a 4 year recruiting and networking firm with courses slipped into the mix. It makes sense for ivies to have small admittance numbers; for better and for worse. They have the network and connections to some of the best companies out there. Your googles and goldman sachs. It's really that simple; want a "proxy" to hire someone into a highly, highly competitive investment banking role that requires intermediate financial skill but the rest of the skillset is fairly general? If you want a proxy for people with the "best" performance and to mitigate risk of hiring a bad employee, why not hire fresh grads out of the school that is the "hardest" to get into?

If you admit 100x more students to Harvard, new "proxies" to hire the "best" people would arise. In my armchair economist opinion

Plus they would lose out on the endowment money successful students would bring in. The average expected earnings of students would dilute down. I'd be the first one to advocate they should be public in order to mandate and increase in size, but as a private university, why should they change at all? It's literally a terrible business decision

Maybe I've got my priorities backwards. But as I see it, the only way to a more prosperous population is to increase the availability of desirable job roles within a country. Not increase education numbers of top schools. Increasing industry supply for high paying jobs that require education will level out the opportunity gap issue between schools

How does that get accomplished? Tough to say. A problem for someone smarter than me

EDIT:

Politics aside, Jeb Bush recently published a pretty good op ed on how to try to kickstart an increase in skilled job opportunities in America through coordinated education planning. Linked below. He has some great points

The method involving Tennessee seems like a great idea. Seems to mirror how Germany approaches education (from my understanding)

https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/08/perspectives/jeb-bush-america...

An actual top school can’t have too many students or else by necessity its best students would have to get a lower quality education by being surrounded by dumber students. So the top schools need to be relatively small in order to serve their purpose.

The article mentions that there were many very qualified candidates who are routinely rejected due to artificial scarcity and that selection among such high quality candidates was arbitrary in many cases. So i doubt, you would be surrounded by dumb students even if you made incoming class sizes larger.

There is no need to bring up the article to point out an obvious fact. It's well known that top schools have imperfect admissions criteria. If they expand their class sizes, it will still be with imperfect admissions criteria, resulting in admitting dumber kids.

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