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> Most institutions provide very little signalling value.

Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.

The key differences:

1. if you aren't Stanford, trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to gain back once lost. One bad placement raises alarms and more than one poisons the well for an entire degree program. There aren't many regional employers per degree program, and national/global employers are a "reach job" for most students. This is something that non-elite institutions know in a visceral and painful way. They are so careful with the few regionally well-regarded degree programs they manage to build. The folly of VC world was obvious to those faculty, and their students (such as me), from the start.

2. if you aren't Stanford, most of your students probably really do need a couple years (at least) of in-person instruction before they are ready for the labor force. Again, anyone who has taught at one of these institutions just knows! Once every 10 years you get the type who didn't really need the degree to learn the material, and you do your best to elevate them past the institution's typical bar for outcomes. But the other 9 years, 100% of students require a lot of real work before they are ready.

In other words, most institutions cannot afford to signal without that signal being extremely accurate. AND they don't have the type of students who don't really need the education. So they educate students and then signal the value of hose students not just through grades but also especially through things like referrals, letters, and so on. But, again, I wouldn't expect a Stanford or UIUC or Michigan grad to understand this world.

You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees. The material is worthless to them. I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.

> You again seem to be caught up in thinking “learning the material” is why employers want employees to have degrees.

Because it is. I'm not bullshitting. I talk with a lot of our top employers. They care about the actual skills and knowledge students bring. They can find plenty of people with good temperaments to promote into those roles if they only need warm bodies with good time management skills.

> I agree that most students do learn a lot from college, but it’s stuff like “how manage your time” and “how to succeed with minimal oversight” not calculus 2.

This simply isn't true for most students in most regional economies. No one is paying a premium for a piece of paper anymore.

It sounds like you are a math teacher, so I suspect your experience is because you are speaking to employers who are looking to hire math students. In that case I agree, calculus is important. For students outside of STEM it’s a different story in my experience.

I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module.

I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations.

I speak with all types of employers for all types of students, in my capacity as a member of those committees/boards. Ranging from high school dropouts finishing their high school diploma later in life to masters students. My comments here are mostly about traditional undergraduate students, though.

It has long been a tradition of Wall Street to hire Ivy grads with name-your-social-studies major (History, Government, English, Philosophy) into investment banking analyst roles. These kids then proceed to live in Excel and Powerpoint for 2+ years. They get hired for the reasons that the parent commenter stated. It's different out here in the tech/startup world - you truly need the skillset beforehand to step into the role, but I imagine there are plenty of other industries similar to Wall St where they just want someone young and smart who they can train to do the job. The core curriculum gets thrown out the window - it's about time management, self motivation to be successful, smart enough to deal with ambiguity, etc.

Yes, I understand. I think the last ten years of Ed Tech startups are people from that class losing huge amounts of LP money because they don't understand that this is not how the other 99% of higher education works.

Thanks for adding your perspective. I’ve definitely always thought of this problem in terms of what you call the “national/global employers” and I’ve never really considered it in terms of non-elite colleges targeting local job markets.

I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.

> My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.

A few thoughts follow.

With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience.

First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of places, but in extremely different role types. I've mostly only been in "normal" roles at low-prestige firms, but I've only been in either pure R&D groups or "elite" product groups at high-prestige firms. So, for me, FAANG-style work looks incredibly different and is completely inaccessible to the average student from my alma mater at basically any point in their career, without substantial additional education. A lot of this personal anecdote is due to comparing my career before and after my (more elite-signalling) PhD. So, it's hard for me to know.

Now, in terms of mentoring, I can say some things.

First, the higher paying firms consistently get our best and brightest students. These students are the ones who only pass through our type of institution once every 5-10 years. Those employees are way more versatile, productive, disciplined, and frankly just intelligent. Are they doing to same work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But FAANG/high finance/et al. does seem to be choosing the absolute cream of the crop. At least from us. They are definitely buying more versatility and higher general intelligence if nothing else. Again, FROM US, a small non-elite school. I know institutional bias means that this may not be true in general.

Second, my impression is that a lot of our students would have a really hard time simply onboarding to tooling at the two FAANGs I know the most about. Think "Java programmer who uses IntelliJ and drops a JAR onto a single VM. Knows about but still isn't very comfortable with things like command lines or version control. Relies on senior engineers for anything more complicated than developing on one or two branches with rare merges and deployment to a single VM". That's a bit of an exaggeration but not far off, so you can see how landing at Google or Facebook might be a painful way for those students to start their career.

FWIW, I think the department is very pragmatics-focused. We aren't failing to teach git because we're too busy teaching automata theory, for example. We don't even teach the latter. So, very focused on software development career prep. But the quality of student and dedication to craft just isn't there. Getting students into internships gives a huge improvement but is still an uphill battle for us. Improving internship placement is therefore a major focus of the alumni's strategic efforts over the next five years. I suspect that with a couple years of full-time work and good mentorship all of our students would be ready for a normal SWE role at FAANG, but straight out of undergrad would fail at even the basics of a FAANG software job.

You might be right about onboarding to FAANG tooling. I was pretty surprised at how complex it was to build a non-trivial backend service at Google: the abstractions used by our chosen internal framework were not straightforward and it took some serious mental effort to wrap my head around everything, despite being familiar with Rails and Spring and the like. Of course once I figured out the tools I was able to create massively scaled stuff much more productively than I could with any open-source tooling. But if I was just a little less smart I might have never figured it out at all.

Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies. But presumably if you stick enough smart people together someone will eventually invent something novel and profitable, even if the median employee never does.

> Personally I don’t think my mental “versatility” got too much exercise there, except maybe in rescuing production systems in emergencies.

Given the cost of every minute of downtime at FAANG scale, the ability to rescue a production system a few hours faster than your competition is worth embarrassing multiples of your wage premium against non-FAANG engineers.

You are both right, honestly.

Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.

However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn.

Making money by educating people is a bad business. It is expensive and time consuming and the more you try to cut expenses the worse the education gets. Non-profit is the right model for it.

If you really want to make money off the back of education build something useful for colleges and universities. They are big complex organizations with specialized needs where off the shelf solutions don’t cut it and there are enough of them to make a nice business out of if you come up with a solution that is dramatically better than what is out there. A lot of the technology solutions that are used barely work but there are few options.

I mostly agree. The one place I split with you -- and hard -- is that I view the institutions in my life as charities. I am admittedly blessed in that all save one (my PhD school) really is basically a well-run charity.

The only one that isn't public and sparten is not rich amd not elite. All are way more lean than most businesses (<10% of staff are non-teaching, and almost all of those are feeding students or keeping buildings standing/clean/powered... I can name every employee on the Administration floor off the top of my head).

If you really want to make money off the back of education... don't. Build your thing and give it away at cost.

But I do understand why someone who only spent time in places like my PhD school would feel differently and view these places as just another industry. I just don't think they are ready for the fact that 90+% of the market competition is way more lean, way more low-profit, and way more human-capital-intensive than any VC is interested in.

I think higher education institutions should be non-profit. I do think there are a lot of financial pressures on most small-medium non-public schools that make them operate in a more business oriented fashion and they must do so to stay open.

When I talk about making money I am talking about system utilized by colleges like enrollment CRMs, grading software etc. In most cases the only way those get made and are supported is through for-profit businesses.

Outside US and a few other countries with private universities, they actually are mostly state sponsored and everyone that meets the grades gets in (of course as per seat availability per year), instead of having to mortage the house.

In some countries private universities even get a bad reputation, with exception of a few renowed ones, as their graduates are seen by the employers as having bought their degree, even if they battled throught it as everyone else, e.g. in Portugal.

> Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.

A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree. A doctorate is more like a title rather than a degree, and if you do it full-time early in your career, it signifies that you can advance from junior to intermediate positions.

Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to.

Harsh… I think a doctorate often means you are difficult, out of touch and got stuck in a bubble too long

I've always understood it as:

A bachelor's is an extension of high school. You show you can assimilate knowledge at a professional level.

A masters shows you can do extensive research of existing knowledge in a narrow field.

A doctorate shows you can perform novel research and add knowledge to a field.

...but perhaps that is not really applicable to all fields of study. In any case, "glorified dropout" is imho too harsh, as it implies a failure. For most people, the economic tradeoff in getting a masters degree or higher (both in terms of tuition and time lost not working) simply makes it a bad choice.

I was describing the old system in Finland, which was similar to many countries in the Continental Europe.

Master's degree was the primary undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degree existed on paper, but it wasn't recognized in the society. People often got their bachelor's and master's on the same day.

At some point, politicians started promoting bachelor's degrees to get people graduate faster. The academia accepted that, but the job market didn't, at least not initially. Because people were not familiar with bachelor's degrees, they often didn't consider them serious degrees. Some people knew them but took them as a negative sign. The idea was that if a university degree is a sign that you can achieve something, leaving the university after bachelor's is sign that you failed at that.

I left Finland a long time ago, and I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.

Instead of sweeping generalisations you should qualify statements if it only applies to long ago in a small non English speaking country.

> I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today.

It's OK to say nothing if you have no information to add

My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degrees.

A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional degree. Law/medical degrees may be graduate or undergraduate degrees. A bachelor's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a master's degree, and a master's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a doctorate. There may be intermediate degrees between a bachelor's and a master's and between a master's and a doctorate. Not all research doctorates are PhDs. An MD is not necessarily a doctorate, and the doctorate in medicine could be an MD, a PhD, or something else. Having a PhD in medicine may imply that you are not an MD.

Whatever your experiences from the academia may be, the academia is not universally like that.

> My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degree

No. Read again what you wrote. It wasn't a qualified statement about different values in different places, ie "in this culture X is more like Y" it was a general claim with no background:

"A bachelor's is a glorified dropout. A master's is the primary academic degree"

Remember the last sentence: "Or they could mean something else, depending on which traditions you are used to."

As an aside, what if the “administrative apparatus” is as important as the academics? In SaaS companies, are sys admins and security engineers less important than the product developers? How important are the networking staff or the staff that handle backups? In higher ed, the administrative apparatus includes a myriad of critical functions and basic infrastructure such as advising, career services, mental health counseling, the registrar (course registration, transcripts), food services, the dormitories, building maintenance, cleaning services, IT, campus police, and on and on. Large universities are basically small cities.

> Most institutions provide very little signaling value.

I don't think this is true.

Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education.

While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offered certificate of completion for $50-$300 per course. These kinds of programs fizzled because even if students did learn the material the certificates did not sufficiently signal to employers that the student had learned it. A friend of mine from one of these universities did an internal study showing that of those students who completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree almost none found employment in their field. This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.

On a more conciliatory note; I generally agree VC ed-tech has been a boondoggle for similar reasons - a combination of misunderstanding education and realizing that no other part of education is monetizable enough to produce the kind of returns VCs want (barring certain extra-ordinary tech innovations that have not been forthcoming e.g. strong AI)

> This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.

To me, it's not at all surprising that "got the [equivalent of a] degree but didn't have the normal level of interaction with faculty" results in a vastly different outcome.

You're assuming that the credential itself is the signal. For regional economies in the US who hire primarily from regional universities, the credential often isn't the primary signal. They'll ask for a reference and actually talk with a faculty member listed.

Colleges and especially individual faculty have ties to major regional employers. Those employers understand that output is more variable (in large part because input in more variable). Other employers don't know anything about the institution at all and are likely to bin the app for any role that isn't eg low-pay or pure commission.

So the institution maintains relationships with alumni and others making hiring decisions at their "strategic" new grad employers, mostly regional small and medium sized companies. Frank assessments from trusted faculty play an important role in securing first placements. This is particularly true for (low-)paid internships, which are often the primary feeder for new grad positions.

If I know that the institution has mixed output and my phone call to the professor listed as a reference is basically "they completed some online modules but we didn't interact much", then I will probably pass.