Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

Comment by advael | Hacker News Reader

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Having been through a lot of school and gotten a lot out of it, I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt. Universities primarily exist to train and employ researchers, and serve a secondary purpose of providing a broad-based education to members of the public. Anything that is useful vocational training in this process is basically an accident, and useful vocational training can be done in a much more time- and cost-efficient way.

I also think the way we test people is set up to be measurable rather than effective, and all this hand-wringing about cheating is an attempt to prop up a premise about pedagogical techniques that simply do not accomplish their goal (and a way to scam universities out of a lot of money for tools like this one). Most of the market for standardized tests is a racket built on market dominance and irrational beliefs about its value built on a (pervasive, policy-level) misunderstanding and subsequent cargo-cult style blind worship of metrics per se

On top of all this, the sheer level of security and privacy violations the school system seems to tolerate for this dubious purpose is ridiculous, and speaks to a deep gap in knowledge about, or devaluation of these things that causes far more problems in our information-driven world than cheating on a dumb test possibly could

I've gotten advanced degrees and consider them to have been overall a valuable experience, but even then most of the education system as we have it was pointless torture, and I probably would have quit school if this nonsense were around when I was in it

"... I am strongly convinced that the current society-wide policy of treating university education as expensive vocational training is a horrible and costly mistake whose main function for the overwhelming majority of students right now is to saddle people with debt."

This is not said often enough and it is a shame.

Universities are not intended to be vocational schools. They're research institutions where the value they generate is the knowledge they discover. The knowledge discovered is often frivilous and arcane with no real use outside of a very specialized subsection of a field of study. However, there's also the knowledge which is 'useless' at the time of its discovery but changes the world later on as its studied further and applications are discovered.

E.g. https://math.berkeley.edu/~gmelvin/math54f12/math110su12_gra...

I don't think there's much more to add than Turchin's ideas of "overproduction of the elites" and it rubs me the wrong way when I hear intelligent people gripe about how university credentials and research have marginal vocational utility. The problem's with a culture that celebrates credentialism and gets people to take on crippling levels of debt to avoid an impovershed future, not scholarship.

Universities are not intended to be vocational schools.

That famously changed under Ronald Reagan. Then came "everyone should go to college", while maybe 10%-20% of the population usefully should.

As a former educator, the only thing I can add on top of this is that training compliance, obedience, and mindless rule-following is a feature, not a bug of the education system.

And I feel like it's drilled into instructors too.

I strongly agree. I think this has been the case for all versions of the public education system in living memory, and the main ways this has changed over the last few decades are twofold:

-More oversight and efficiency in this process is breaking down the unofficial means through which anyone got anything else out of it (e.g. real mentorship from educators who care that is not encouraged so much as tolerated by education policy, opportunities to engage with new ideas in a meaningful way, good reading recommendations, an incidental avenue into a social life)

-The structure and function of public education is increasingly infecting university curricula, structure, and priorities

I think this likely has the effect in broader society of creating less fluid competency and more blank-faced compliance, and this disproportionately affects people in key leadership roles as schooling becomes more of a selection pressure on people's career paths

I'm interested in perspectives on this from outside the US or Anglosphere generally - I'm from Australia and the education is largely similar if not worse as it inherited British hierarchicalism (is that a word? it is now!)

Everything you said is spot on, and it pains me to type that.

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