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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.

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Bingo. A BS is a great filter for hard working and higher IQ.

Guess who does really really good in sales? People who play varsity or college sports. Is it a rule? Nope. Is it a great heuristic? Yep. Does football teach you sales? Not really... but it does filter for certain traits, one of which is probably pure animal magnetism and the base desire of humans to be influenced bt the most fit individual.

Team sports teach you how to work productively with people, including people you might not like. That skill directly transfers to sales.

And it almost certainly also filters for competitiveness, probably more so than the typical technical curriculum does.

I like to phrase it this way—in life, there’s a lot of bullshit. In college, there’s a lot of bullshit. If you can handle four years of bullshit in college, that’s a good sign.

The "washout" would work equally well if they were teaching non-BS.

And what do we teach people for 12 years before college? Is college the first time people learn how to learn?

The 12 years before is mandatory so it's no indication but it used to be when it wasn't. That's why high school diplomas don't matter as much as they did in say 1920

public school is just daycare, not a school at all, due to lowering the bar and easing curriculum in the name of "equity".

We could probably do a better job in the years leading up to the 16-18 year old start of going away to college. But we'd probably need to spend the money to customize things a lot more. One of the fun reads I had over the past year or so was from the NY Times on basically a one-room schoolhouse in Alta Utah where the kids basically spent half the day skiing. I can think of worse things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/us/alta-utah-public-schoo...

With AI what we going to see is unbundling of school: education separately, socialization separately.

You can socialize with your ski buddies. You can study with self-selected motivated group of teens together with AI and a tutor (college grad with AI teaching high schoolers, high schoolers with AI teaching mid schoolers, etc).

This model will be decentralized and more like twitch group, rather than centrally administered school District

That’s the problem. You can’t just eliminate pre-college and hope everything works out fine.

Because AI.

College wont be needed because of AI, the entirety of liberal arts is already obsolete.

Engineering disciplines can be split into blue collar (like operating CNC) learned at vocational schools, and deep tech (research focused) - these really only need “elite” colleges like top1%. The rest of 99% of colleges might as well disappear

The level of disconnect from reality you often see in tech circles is pretty amazing.

this is my vision of the future, given the current rapid pace of development of ai.

just ask yourself: are you ready to pay $300k (65k tuition+20k living costs per year) for each of your kid to go to college, party, get drunk and study data structures & algorithms and Java?

do you want to spend 300k so your kid understands Cormen Leiserson algorithms book and do you think it is a good value ?

and I am talking about CS - arguably one of the highest ROI degrees out there.

meanwhile a kid from India/Eastern Europe who got same CS degree for $10k out of pocket will get the same knowledge and can get the same faang job

a kid from India/E̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶n̶ Europe got same CS degree for $10k

not even that much. just cost of living. so why not adopt the same model everywhere?

I'm not sure what AI has to do with that question to be honest. The discussion upthread was about secondary education which is required at some level and generally free (to the student's family) in the US today. There are tons of resources for self-study and other activities for motivated students/families.

As for college/trade schools, options range from essentially free for self-study to very expensive with everything in between. Again, I'm not sure to what degree AI changes most of that. I'm certainly prepared to believe that credentialism becomes less important in some fields (it sort of has in CS) but that has less to do with AI than some companies relying less on universities to do their vetting for them.

Other fields, of course, differ. You've got a lot better shot at a top-paying job in Big Law if you went to Harvard Law and clerked for a Supreme Court justice.

My argument is that secondary education is not about education, since standards have dropped with the introduction of common core and other improvement in the name of "education equity".

If you want to send your kid to daycare, please go ahead and send to public school. But more and more parents opt for alternatives to public school: private schools, college prep programs, charter schools, extra-curricular Math and science classes, coaches/tutors and etc.

In the end it doesn't make sense to maintain bloated school system that does not accomplish anything, but being glorified childcare for teens, while all academic achievements are due to self-selection.

You can look at any top-rated high school and realize they are not doing anything much. They just have self-selection mechanism that filters the most motivated kids with strong parent support.

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