Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

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It's a catastrophe. Academics have always grossly oversold their own importance and the "value" of what they teach.

The most valuable education is at the primary level (0 to 10 years old); then secondary (to 18); and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.

By the point you're an adult, you aren't being "moulded" into anything, you're merely acquiring particular useful bits of knowledge that only have value if you're going to use them.

What we have now is people spending tens of thousands to avoid earning money for several years; and thereby avoiding acquiring useful skills.

And this is an economic catastrophe which burdens everyone in society and grossly misdirects public funds.

I would be very supportive of an 12mo "generic higher learning skills" programmes being deployed at this scale. ie., something closer to a teenager-to-gradscheme transition programme which could include higher-level generic maths, writing, humanities, etc. skills.

However what we have now is a gigantic tulip-style bubble that needs bursting or else we will continue to needlessly in-debt the next generations of people.

The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....

(* perhaps less so for HN readers )

> and tertiary education hardly has any effect whatsoever.

This is the education I use all the time to make money. It matters that I can write and do arithmetic, but my entire career is based on what I learned after the age of 18.

Everyone's job relates to skills acquired post-18, necessarily so. The question is what role a university plays in that; and whether it actually provides those skills. Or whether, for example, the job itself can.

I started programming as a child, and used this irc-gained knowledge and self-study to earn money till c. 26.

I studied physics during. Much of what I make money with now was gained via MIT/Stanford/et al. initially on iTunes U, and latterly on youtube -- both during my apparent "attendance" at university; and for years afterwards.

It would have been entirely possible for me to skip my entire university experience and still have the postgrad level of knowledge I have now: as almost all of it was gained via free lecture courses.

You might say I'm cheating here: the content is still provided by some universities. Sure.

The question remains whether even for the very high end, this process needs years at university; and whether all of them need to repeat it. Let alone how meaningless the process is on the low-end.

I have been offered a PhD in a highly technical area (which I declined) -- and I can assure you nearly everything which landed me in that position had little to do with whatever my university "did". I barely attended.

So in other words:

“We don’t need formal schooling beyond middle school because everyone can learn job skills as a child, and then self-study graduate level material from books and youtube and do independent PhD-level research with no funding, structure, or support.”

This argument strongly reminds me of the guy I met who claimed nobody needs a paid job because they can just scavenge free food from restaurant garbage bins.

I used my case to question how central the university needs to be in any process of skill acquisition: high-end, or low-end.

I wasn't answering the question; I was asking it.

It is still clearly the case the university has a role. I just do not think we have caught up to how well employers can train their employees; how well even highly advanced skills can be acquired; how very very recent advancements (youtube, etc.) can provide a good-quality education; and so on.

In an age where meaningful professional development can be made without the university, there is a serious question to be asked: how many will meaningfully benefit from the university system? (And: how many are meaningfully harmed?).

The answer, in both cases, is surely: some.

This is a very valid and important point. I'm involved in tech training for the company I work for, and during lockdown we've provided a lot of material as videos and self-study documents.

A lot of those have got very good, and we have to ask ourselves what value we add to the learning process. It's still something we're discussing, and it's definitely led us to alter how we think about training (and out of our safe areas!)

You add value by modelling thought process to the learners, as you solve problems which are relevant to them.

Consider: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4 or anything of this kind.

And ask: what is David doing as the narrator (of his own thought process) ?

> Or whether, for example, the job itself can.

Employers can sponsor degrees, it's still efficient to have specialised educators.

The issue here is that if students fund their own education, they have "skin in the game", and don't rely on employers to gatekeep these roles.

That said, maybe an education tied to an actual job offer would be best; there are too many un-economic degrees given to 18yos - it might be best if the risk in an education was only put on an individual who was already older and somewhat financially secure.

"it worked for me so it must work for everyone"

I think many people do enjoy university as an environment where like minded people are there to share different ideas. Just as a zoom meeting is no replacement for real meeting, i don't think sitting through MIT youtube channels is the same as actually attending MIT.

> I don't think sitting through MIT youtube channels is the same as actually attending MIT.

There's an increasingly large number of second tier school admins that are making the opposite bet (more online programs, wider admission pool, commuter and all-online certificates). My bet is that in the next 20 years we'll see an even bigger gap between the online crowd and the few in-person institutions that will remain.

Interesting points, and I concur. The best takeaway from university was some of the friends and connections, in both cases as involved in the same field as I am. Good people to know.

Though, I'm sure the need for good friends and connections could be provided in other ways whilst studying. All things are subject to change and needs will be met if they're important enough.

> This is the education I use all the time to make money.

I'm curious what your degree is in and what you do. My degrees (undergraduate and graduate) were in CS, and I've been employed as a computer programmer my whole life. It's rare to nonexistent that I actually do something for work that I was specifically taught to do by a university professor; there's a pervasive belief here on HN and elsewhere that a CS degree is useless for a programming job (a smaller minority might even suggest that a CS degree disqualifies you from being capable of programming computers professionally). Since I can't say that I learned how to, say, debug a program, or construct a SQL statement, or isolate a performance issue, or diagnose a network connection problem in college, the only counter I have to this viewpoint is that college exposed me to more general problem-solving techniques that are more abstract but broadly useful. Of course, I'll never know if I'd have been just as effective a programmer without ever having set foot in a college or not.

Now we've got "Invest in students" programs that amount to indentures: how long before those are "a success from private finance we must make public for the children" and worse?

When do our societies ever look at the silly shit they're into and say "this shit is silly, let's stop it"? The Civil Rights movement maybe... Usually tho it comes to doubling down on the silly until something else breaks.

> The emperor really has no clothes on: your* degree really was a waste of money....

I mean... my degree is why I can work in the United States and has been (and will continue to be) worth an unbelievable amount of money.

More seriously though, a university education can be very valuable (we can measure the wage premium [1]), but the cost matters. A 4 year degree at in-state state school prices is almost always worth it (provided you graduate). It is difficult to tease out how much of the value is selection effects vs. signaling vs. credentialism vs. networking vs. exposure to challenge/opportunity vs. skills vs. knowledge vs. stepping stone to a professional degree (medicine/law/engineering/nursing). Thinking about my own experience, obviously the credential was a huge deal, but so was my school's co-op program that got me my first software jobs, and there are still classes that shaped the way I think to this day [2].

Where things go off the rails is when people think they can buy their way into the upper classes by getting a degree from a prestigious school (and spend way too much doing so), or people get snookered by for profit colleges or people who don't have a good chance of completing get pressured into going to a four year program and end up with the debt, but not the credential (you mostly don't get partial credit).

You could argue that the wage premium is just class discrimination through credentialism. Maybe it is... but then that's the thing that needs to be dismantled. As an individual if you have a good shot at finishing a 4 year degree and can afford it, you should probably play the game unless you happen to have much better options.

[1] Eg. $640/week median college vs. high school in Q4 2020: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/07/is-college-still-wor...

[2] The crash course in epistemology in my Evolutionary Biology class, the complementary rationalism of my Discrete Mathematics Course, the Econ 101 perspective from Introduction to Micro-Economics. Not to mention the tour of data-structures and algorithms from my Computer Science classes so I can do leet code interviews :). Maybe I could have picked the stuff up on my own, but would I have if I was working in a factory back home?

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