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Comment by sirspacey | Hacker News Reader

The history of universities, especially the American system, are a fascinating study in a century plus of institutional evolution.

Even the universities with particular mutations (New School, Olin) have evolved in fascinating ways.

Broadly, university evolution is:

1. Real estate development 2. Sports 3. Research grants 4. Brand 5. Source of vetted early talent 6. International tuition dollars

Almost none of what a university is economically designed to do is ensure students are trained for success in their career and life.

If there’s any directly relevant student benefit, it is certification - a fairly benign benefit.

What’s critical to grok is that universities are quite literally accredited based on how similar they look & behave to their peers.

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The only indirect way student success and benefit plays a role is in 3, 4 and 6. Having personel on grants that comes from "prestigious" universities was seen as a plus by some of the grant reviewers I was sitting with in committees. It also plays with the brand to attract students and donation money (which play a big role still in some places).

There is an interesting movement now where universities are getting out of the rankings they have been avidly optimizing their metrics for in the last decades. I have sat in another kind of committee where one of the administrator rejected a project because it would divert funds from something that would improve the ranking (something about facilities that needed updates can't remember exactly what it was).

> If there’s any directly relevant student benefit, it is certification - a fairly benign benefit.

That might be a benign benefit for the direct recipient. But it's a poisonous arms race for everyone else.

The arms race itself is a recent evolution that required a few conditions to kick off.

The debate on this will be never ending, and however much I personally value the benefits of international trade, the movement of well paying blue collar roles is the initiating factor.

This arms race didn’t exist here back in the 60s and 80s for example. However it was alive and well in Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

That runaway competition for certification is just… enshrined in the socio-economic fabric there. That structure is why there are so many doctors / engineers and graduates from the region.

If anything, it’s remarkable how long it took to get started here. The upside is that if there ever a chance to slow it down, it’s now.

but this is a very natural evolution though right?

i mean i dont know if its indeed recent or not i feel like maybe it just is what the market is demanding.

maybe the market didnt require to be education to make a living wage back then. and maybe now it does thus the race.

i mean you cant tell people not to get educated or moreso not to make as much money as you can right.

The market isn't demanding education in the sense of workers knowing a lot. The market is demanding education in the sense of having a degree.

You can check that by seeing how many employers actually care about what people remember from their university days. In the majority, it's fine for people to forget what they learned immediately after the exam.

(Of course, there are exceptions.)

The market (firms) needs to filter candidates.

The best paying jobs that remain require learning and not just high school diplomas.

So that’s what people are incentivized to obtain. Even if they hate it.

Like any metric, eventually people focus on the metric not the aspect it’s meant to measure.

Eventually everyone has a degree, so the previous filter threshold resulted in too many candidates.

The threshold is moved higher, which means that there is now a glut of candidates who are not considered for the roles they are aiming for.

They look for the next best options.

Repeat ad Infinitum and now you have college degree requirements for roles that don’t really need them.

——-

To be honest, this is a place where GenAi can actually help, without turning into some nightmare of evals or soulless chat bots.

Half the time I’m wondering if I should just quit and build this or figure out how to do it within the firm.

Idk about university, but high school is indisputably important because it's training data for the brain.

> it's training data for the brain.

Has the word "education" fallen out of favor recently?

welcome to hn and the latest tech bubble. why communicate in anything other than coded language

yes, did you miss the last back-propagation?

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