Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

I think this article misses the point. The problem with our University system right now is they have a monopoly. A correct market price can only be set if competition is allowed and that only happens when everyone is allowed to compete. That's the not the case right now.

The bar to gain accreditation is so high that only large universities and (relatively) dishonest private corporations can get accredited. This puts an artificially high barrier to entry for competition.

If we made one simple change and accredited testing facilities instead of Universities the cost of education would plummet. What I mean by this is we as a society say...

"This is what a [Insert Major Here] should know. We don't care how you get the knowledge. At University, Online, Divine Intervention, whatever. Anything is acceptable as long as you can prove you have the knowledge at an accredited testing facility."

So the tests would be the same because they would be the tests students take at University now and testing facilities would have to prove they can administer those tests properly. But you could get the knowledge wherever you choose. So if you can pass the tests for a BS in Mathematics by watching Khan Academy videos that's fine.

I can't even imagine how fast the cost of an education would fall if that happened.

Testing is the wrong approach, IMO. It's, at best, a proxy for actual knowledge, and suffers from the inherent problems of all proxy measures (the same is true for grades -- if a class is worth taking, there's way too much material to boil it down to a single letter). We've used tests and grades in the past because we had no better option, but that's no longer the case.

The web lets us assemble large-scale portfolios of our actual work and transmit them to potential employers with a link. As an employer, would you rather see:

a) A transcript showing that the person got an A in his CS senior design project (or got some specified score on a test). b) A link to github which lets you see the actual code that the person wrote for the project.

I know which one I'd rather see.

There's no real reason why a student couldn't deposit all of his work in an archive (with perhaps some sort of vetting/certification by the professor or institution), then grant access to the archive (or selected parts of the archive) to potential employers.

I'd rather see a usable sort key (item a), maybe with a short description.

Given that you have a position to fill, and a deadline for when you need it filled, and a large number of applicants, and other everyday work you need to keep doing... how many minutes each are you able to spend on a first-pass review of the applicants?

As they saying goes, you get what you give.

There's nothing wrong with picking someone that way, but you're essentially selecting someone based on random chance. You'll probably find someone who is adequate at the job, and if that is what you want, who am I to judge?

But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how you do it. The benefit of the open market is that the one who does it right will find greater success with their hire.

At some point, you need to decide that one candidate is better than the others.

So, you need some function that provides at least a partial ordering of your candidates (ie, a sort key).

Computing these sort keys is expensive. It can be optimized by (partial) precomputation. Maybe this is a letter grade from a school, or having/not having a degree, or a summary prepared by the candidate (a resume), or whatever.

You probably don't entirely trust whoever did that precomputation. So you'll want to check their work. You can't do this for every candidate since you still want time to sleep at night. So, you need to use that pre-computed sort key as a filter to throw out at least some portion of the applicants. But the ones that you don't throw out, you'll want to investigate further.

This could be reviewing their past work (github portfolio, etc). Or it could be in-person interviews, or phone interviews, or whatever.

If looking over a portfolio is less expensive than doing an interview, does it let you filter out enough candidates to be cost-effective?

But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.

The only way to find the best (or the "good enough") is from a (at least partially) sorted list. What varies is the quality of the sorting, and of the contents of the list. Given limited resources, how do you maximize the quality of the sorting (assuming somebody else is handling maximizing the quality of the list contents)?

In professions where the portfolio is more acceptable or possible, you see a higher percentage of corporations willing to hire candidates with no university education. You see it in software and in graphical design and other creative fields. In other fields not so much.

> The bar to gain accreditation is so high that only large universities and (relatively) dishonest private corporations can get accredited

What stops an honest private corporation from getting accredited?

I'm guessing guild-like political discretion.

And financial requirements. Because public universities have subsidies and donations coming in they can afford facilities required by some of the more arcane standards. Private Universities have to charge an arm and a leg and basically bury students in debt they'll likely never pay. If you aren't willing to do that you have a hard time succeeding

Nothing. They call those "universities".

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