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mystraline

ChatGPT and other LLMs just turned the screws on a already broken system.

1. Most people get a degree to pass degree checks in jobs.

2. College is stupid expensive.

3. Unlike with other goods and services, there is no way to get your money back on bad service/goods here

4. Professors can basically do whatever they want

5. Fed student loans are in the same group as criminal judgements of debt.

When I look at all of these, logically, you expect a return from the cost. And the return isn't knowledge, but a diploma. And humans being good tool users, use a tool to raise the chances of getting that (half-assed promised but not really) diploma.

Hopefully, this will destroy universities as diploma mills, and go back to proper academic rigor and study. But one can be ever hopeful, I guess.

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> Professors can basically do whatever they want

Maybe that was true at some point, but they certainly can't anymore.

Speaking with professors around me (at universities on different continents!), they all report that they basically have to give everyone passing grades, they can't tell students off/kick them out of the class for engaging in outwardly rude behavior (eg wearing headphones, obviously playing games/watching videos/etc. for the duration of the class), they have to accept pretty much any request for extension/makeup exams/etc, they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

If you want to go back to proper academic rigor and study, you have to return authority to the professors.

Well, when almost all professors now are adjuncts...

This is a variant of 'kids these days', that we've documented all the way back to Plato.

If I buy a thing at Wal-Mart or Bezosmart, and it doesn't work, I can get my money back.

If I pay for service, like dry-clean my clothes, and its not done right, I can get my money back, or they offer to redo it.

In academics, none of this applies. Garbage professor? Too bad. Professor grades on curve? Too bad. Professor doesn't teach and just reads from book? Too bad. Professor does (bad but not illegal thing)? Too bad.

And failures are always assumed to be the students pure responsibility, and none of the professors' responsibility.

Combined with 'you will pay this and all other classes back up to when you're 50', and 'you need a diploma to be able to pay it back', the situation is set.

As I said, its a mixture of these premises is what leads to this situation. And there's no good answer here. Well, I guess de-capitalizing universities could work, along with jobs no longer demanding a 'degree', would go to that direction as well. But I am not hopeful.

My time in college was 10 years ago, but absolutely none of that was true at the time (I personally seen pretty much everything you referred to as "not allowed"). I find it very hard to believe that much has changed since then.

My spouse is a professor at a highly ranked US university. While these things are not completely impossible, there is major institutional pressure against this sort of authority amongst professors.

Things really have changed over the last decade.

In Australia, two friends who are uni professors, one in admin/leadership position for their faculty, and my partner teaches some science undergrad courses in their phd topics. It is absolutely that bad with both subtle pressures and blatant failures aligning to progress fee paying students to completion regardless of competency or pedagogy.

I disagree. I had a number of tenured professors who absolutely did not give AF. They were openly hostile and put in the barest minimum to teaching, because as they told us, they would rather be doing research. I attended a research university, and that's cool and all, but the job of a professor should be to teach, and research should be second. In my humble opinion, that has been turned around. So we do have a lot of tenured professors, essentially immune from their core responsibility, slowly phoning it in as they prioritize research over lecture.

My wife is currently a professor. None of that is true for her. She fails people all the time for cheating, non-attendance or whatever. She gives them a few chances not to dig their own grave, and some still do it.

Re: Do whatever they want. She has a colleague who is a terrible teacher. She hears all the time and students learned nothing in her class. That teacher does run a couple of software businesses on the side, and most likely is just trying to find smart kids and recruit them for cheap coding labor.

There is pressure to admit students from overseas colleges, where it's kind of known they are rich kids who cheated and bribed their way through undergrad programs and often come unprepared for the masters programs they are applying for. These are some the kids who I described at the start of my post, and the most egregious cheaters (turning in coding assignments with other people's names on them, getting caught cheating 5 times, and asking for a call where they ask if there's any way they can pass). It's nuts.

> they can't give a student a 0 when they've obviously used chatGPT (ie cheated) for an assignment.

I used to teach at university level (not in the US). I gave a 0 to a cheating student. Next day, the head of the section came to me in a panic. "omg, what have you done? you can't do that...". Actually, I think he wasn't even worried about legal implications, he genuinely thought this was very unfair to the student and that I was some kind of prick.

Actually, there are very specific procedures to deal with cheating, and it's so time consuming that it's better to avoid them altogether and just close your eyes.

Edit: another anecdote, I refused late students to my class (after warning them several times). Again, I got reprimanded by the head of the department for being too strict.

Most uni admins push back hard against failing grades. https://old.reddit.com/r/Professors/

> And the return isn't knowledge, but a diploma.

Do you believe that if you were given a diploma saying you passed med school with flying colors, you could just go be a doctor? Knowledge doesn't matter, it's all about that diploma?

Personally I think it's the exact opposite. The diploma doesn't matter, it's the knowledge you want. CS is a good example of that, plenty of great programmers with no degree. Diploma doesn't matter.

A lot of my peers slacked off in university, since then I've had an extremely easy time getting jobs whereas I know many of my peers have struggled. Most of my job applications have resulted in interviews and all of my interviews have resulted in job offers.

We all have the diploma, difference is knowledge. While my peers were struggling with their assignments I was already done, spending my time helping them and studying further. When they were finally done with the assignment they slacked off until the next thing they were required to do, while I was programming for fun, exploring new things, studying to prepare for every lecture etc.

University is the perfect environment for learning. You have lots of time, guidance, peers, resources etc. The fact that most people completely ignore that opportunity does not change its value. You get what you give.

If you're going into a field where you need a solid technical foundation the knowledge is what matters. But if you're going into an unrelated domain like most college grads who enter non-technical, white-collar jobs the diploma is the return because the coursework has no direct relevance to the profession, but employers will filter out applicants without degrees.

Someone with a bachelors in history has a much higher likelihood of being hired for an entry level sales role for example, than someone without one. But that bachelors isn't conferring any unique knowledge about sales.

I'd bet that the vast majority of office jobs that require a degree do not actually need or even check for any of the educational content that the degree signifies. They purely use "college degree in anything" as a generic hurdle. No way any employer hiring some generic office assistant whose job is to move papers from one filing cabinet to another and help schedule meetings, is going to care what that person's major was. They just want to see "degree."

Whether we like it or not, college has become a vending machine, where you insert $X00,000, and out comes a key to allow you access to at least interview for maybe 60+% of (generally higher-paying) jobs out there. Education may happen as a nice side effect, but people aren't spending this kind of money purely for education. I sure would not. I also would not spend that kind of money and then just accept not getting that "key" at the end of the transaction.

If we want universities to function as a place to obtain a rigorous education, we need to drastically reduce the cost, and stop employers from using the diploma to gatekeep nice white collar office jobs.

State colleges cost considerably less than $x00,000, especially if you do two years at community college first.

The more expensive the university, the greater the chances of getting the even higher paying of the higher paying jobs. Its rational for people to pay the premium for name-brand university if the expected payoff is some CEO-track position. Not all will get it of course, but that is the calculation.

This is why we need better quality high school math.

> 1. Most people get a degree to pass degree checks in jobs.

How many top physicists didn't go to university? How many Nobel Prize winners (aside from Peace or Literature)? How many degree-less engineers do you want to be building your bridges? Or surgeons operating on you?

This is such a software dev centric view. In software it kind of works because you can learn and "practice" with just a computer. This is also why there's a fair amount of car mechanics without degrees. But it's much harder to "practice" many other things. As a software dev who never went to university, I also readily admit that I never did some of the more theoretical foundational stuff. Is that relevant in my day-to-day work? Mostly not. Until it is.

Also you don't need a student loan or huge amount of money to get a degree. There are plenty of places where you can get bachelor/master degree for small tuition fee.

> plenty of places where you can get bachelor/master degree for small tuition fee

not in America, not anymore

How about South America? That one in the south hemisphere.

You're talking about rigorous fields where practitioners need a solid technical base. There are lots of white-collar jobs that really don't require a college education but employers will filter out applicants with degrees.

And if you're aware of history, it was this case that moved companies to use degrees.

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/

Previously, tests could be administered to determine aptitude, but was found illegal form of discrimination. However, academic degrees somehow werent that.

This Forbes article goes I to it much better than I. https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2014/11/06/thank-or-...

As for other comments, I find it telling that professions like Medical Doctor, professional engineer, and the like have an apprenticeship built in, but somehow that invalidated my comments? (Hint: it doesn't)

> Previously, tests could be administered to determine aptitude, but was found illegal form of discrimination.

Not strictly true. But you have to be able to show that your test actually measures something important to the task, without at the same time being biased by unrelated issues. Which is hard, and requires domain knowledge, and might mean that some tests couldn't't be written tests, so it scared off the HR types.

And, yeah, of course you're right that those same unrelated issues keep people from getting degrees. But everybody gets to ignore that somehow.

Perhaps the right approach to the "degree" thing would be more regulation, in the form of a requirement that you show that the actual subject matter of the specific degrees you were requiring or advantaging was relevant to job performance. No more "any college degree" BS.

The point of trying to determine aptitude is exactly that it does not measure current ability to perform specific tasks or possession of specific domain knowledge, but rather general ability to learn/flexibility to be given new tasks.

One of the places where software has succeeded is that the industry gets away with quietly trying to test for intelligence while ostensibly making it look work related (algorithm puzzles, "wanting to hear how candidates think"). IBM straight up gave me math problems (like solving systems of equations under time pressure) when applying to my first programming job in addition to some basic whiteboard coding. This is part of why it's possible for smart people without CS degrees to break into the field.

Basically any job where you're not acting as a human automaton benefits from general learning ability, so if degrees stop working or stop being allowed, people will no doubt look for another proxy.

> The point of trying to determine aptitude is exactly that it does not measure current ability to perform specific tasks or possession of specific domain knowledge, but rather general ability to learn/flexibility to be given new tasks.

Great. You can go ahead and do that then... provided that your test actually measures that and not a bunch of unrelated knowledge. Which is a lot of what an "aptitude test" designed by a clueless person will actually tend to measure. And honestly is also a lot of what the ability to get a degree tends to measure.

You might be able to fix the test, but I don't think you can fix the degree.

> IBM straight up gave me math problems (like solving systems of equations under time pressure) when applying to my first programming job in addition to some basic whiteboard coding.

... which is mostly going to measure how recently you've had to do a bunch of similar mathematical tasks, to the point where that overwhelms almost anything else. And has the bonus of not being obviously related your general ability to learn or flexibility. I suppose how you do on that might have some correlation with your ability to code under similar time pressure... which of course only happens in badly managed projects.

That's exactly the sort of selection process you get when you let clueless fools try to come up with ways to measure things like "ability to learn" or "flexibility".

Degrees are a filtering mechanism. In almost all fields/positions they are a weak signal of aptitude, not a strong one. But there are no strong signals of aptitude before the interviewing process at the very least, and most of the time there is no strong signal until the candidate is actually employed and working. So I don't disagree with you, but the person you're replying to is just stating a reality of the job market and the reason people are going to college.

It's 200€ per year here in France, not that expensive. I am talking Sorbonne and other prestigious universities.

Then we have chep engineering schools (including the most famous ones) and then we have crazy expensive finance schools (including the best in the world) at about 25k€ pet year. Except if you are poor and then it is basically free.

The only way that will change is if companies stop requiring college degrees as a "check the box" step to even get considered by some automated hiring system. _That_ is what is driving universities as diploma mills, not the universities themselves.

See what jobs you can get these days with a high school diploma, and you understand the economics of a university degree.

This also ties in with the US no longer manufacturing much of anything -- which created a lot of decent jobs that didn't require a college degree. Those jobs are gone.

This. LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work. Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability - a great way to get a law suite. Colleges need to pivot fast.

A prediction that will prove mostly immune to the change in "this year".

>LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work.

I think the high interest rates, poor consumer economic situation and remote work with outsourcing did way more to damage that jobs market than LLMs right now.

I am yet to hear jobs being replaced with LLMs but I hear about jobs moved to cheaper locations all the time. LLMs make workers more efficient at easy, low-stakes repetitive shit but don't fully replace them. Yet. They also don't replace accountability. A lot of times managers/corporations just hire to have a scapegoat to throw under the bus if the shit hits the fan. You can fire and intern for doing something wrong, you can't fire a LLM that fucks up, it's still the user to blame.

Couple with the bullwhip effect of too many grads going to University chasing those lucrative white collar jobs from the covid boom days and this is what you get.

>Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability

Sounds like a US specific self inflicted problem.

You don't take a worker and explicitly replace them with an LLM (unless it's a customer service agent or something)... It looks more like, the company just doesn't need as many people for a given job type but it's not a 1:1 replacement at an individual level.

The GGP said, "LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work". That claim is that LLMs are a "1:1 replacement at an individual level", and this is what the GP was responding to.

I read "ended the need for" in terms of the overall situation. When I say they're not 1:1 replacement, that's a possible reason why it might not look directly like people are being replaced, even though it may still be happening in the aggregate.

They are pretty good at most white collar jobs. Blue collar not so much.

> Colleges need to pivot fast.

The problem is the same everywhere - the management (administration) has grown like a mushroom. We need more profs and instructors because oral exams are the only way to verify knowledge that can't be easily gamed - aside bribes. That's scary because ethics are not what they once were.

Pivot to what?

Towards other fully WFH white collar careers: OnlyFans and Twitch streaming. We're speed running towards the Idiocracy timeline where humanity is too stupid to do anything but be employed in the ad driven attention economy.

> Recent grads at this point are just a legal/tax (sec 174) liability

The opposite of a liability is a deduction

> LLMs have ended the need for white collar junior work.

If you think that juniors are solely for doing the low level work (which is wrong).

The purpose of the junior is to work towards becoming senior (in experience and capability). Doing the the bs work is just an additional use of their time.

Your thinking is akin to the belief that the purpose of the medical residency is to do examinations and not to become a full fledged doctor.

The need for white collar juniors will become achingly apparent when we realize in a few years we have no white collar seniors.

LLMs are currently at the level of a fresh graduate, not even someone with 2 years of real-world experience.

While I expect this to change, I don't know how fast, nor where the ceiling is — always the trouble with S-curves, you can never tell how close you are to the mid-point, and with even a tiny bit of noise you can't even tell which side of the mid-point you are.

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