Hacker News Reader

Comment by rahimnathwani | Hacker News Reader

Many (most?) people go to college primarily for the piece of paper, not for the educational and social experience.

And resultingly, if you do go to college and immerse yourself in the educational experience, you come out with superpowers compared to your peers.

Getting companies to see those superpowers in a hiring pipeline of course is a different story

Do American colleges not give degree grades? In the UK your degree class (grade) is moderately important for your first job

All serious applicants have the maximum grade, in the US system.

I don’t think this is strictly true, but I do think it’s true that college GPA is not a differentiating factor.

American colleges give out a GPA, which used to mean something but has now been inflated to the point of meaninglessness. 60% of my college class 10 years ago had a 3.5/4 or higher. The median grade at Harvard is an A. I am told that since COVID, B grades and below now require a written explanation by the professor at several schools.

Given that the bar for getting into Harvard is rather high these days, shouldn't we expect the median grade in Harvard to be fairly high? If C students aren't allowed into Harvard these days, doesn't it make sense they aren't giving out Cs?

A bit of context on that grading question here. It was interesting to me that grading has gone through a couple waves of inflation over the decades: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/what-i-talk-about-when-i-tal...

Wouldn't a C in Harvard mean "average for a Harvard student"?

oh my sweet summer child.

Harvard was one of the leaders of the charge in terms of grade inflation back 20ish years ago

Yeah, and they made a push to rein it in back in the early aughts. As with all things grade inflation, what goes down, must come back up. I'm sure we'll be back here in 20 years having the same conversation.

I've interviewed Harvard CS grads for SWE roles at big tech who couldn't write a working program for fizzbuzz, for defanging an IP address, or for reversing words in a sentence, in a language of their choice, with leetcode's provided instructions, in half an hour, with unlimited attempts, gentle coaching from me, and the ability to use the internet to search for anything that isn't a direct solution (e.g. syntax).

Yes, more than one.

Either the bar for getting into Harvard cannot possibly be as high as it's made out to be, someone's figured out how to completely defeat degree-validation service providers, or Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree.

If you don’t cram for leetcode, you won’t pass a leetcode interview. It takes some kids a few interviews to figure that out, even they are from elite school like MIT. You were just their learning experience.

If you can't solve FizzBuzz in half an hour with a language of your choice while being able to look up syntax, your problem isn't that you failed to cram for leetcode, it's that you don't know how to write code.

There's nothing inherently wrong with not being able to write code, but you probably shouldn't be applying for software engineering roles where the main responsibility of the job is ultimately to write working code.

Just to be clear I have no problem passing these interviews, I just spent a few weeks cramming leetcode and got a job at Google. Leetcode wasn’t the main reason I was hired, but it was a filter that I had to get through (I’ve never been given fizzbuzz before, but I assume that is just because it’s no longer in style and hasn’t been for more than a decade). You just don’t throw yourself into on the fly coding, you practice them because your competition has and you will look bad if you don’t. Let’s not pretend that any of us are ready to do alien dictionary at the spur of a moment, or thats a useful skill for our role.

I'd agree with you 100% if these were Leetcode mediums and hards. They were not, these were quite literally the easiest LC easies I could find.

While my career involves writing code, I am not a SWE, I have never done any formal leetcode prep, and I have no formal education in technology beyond a high school CS class. I have no college degree whatsoever, not even an associate's degree.

I had a rule I stuck to when doing these interviews (which were for a SWE role) that felt very fair to me - I would not give these candidates any problem I couldn't solve in the same circumstances.

For reference, in the allotted time, one such candidate spent a good chunk of their time reading up on JS if/then syntax on w3schools. As I watched, I reminded them they could use any language they wanted, if they were more comfortable or familiar with others, and this Harvard CS grad declined, stating JS was their "strongest" language.

My best guess about these cases were rich kids / legacy admissions that weren't allowed to be failed for political reasons.

I don’t know much about Harvard except like Stanford computer science became the biggest major by far in the last couple of decades. It could be a lot of rich kids are choosing it’s a major without much of a passion for it. It could have also become the default major for people who are planning to got into politics, business, management, or even law (Harvard’s traditional strengths).

Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have much of a choice in evaluating especially junior hires. Even for senior hires you want to make sure they haven’t drifted through their last jobs without actually coding. But on the spot performances are different even for the simple stuff, they should practice coding questions on the fly regardless, and even the worst possible SWE candidate should be able to pass these with a bit of prep. With a lot of prep they could do leetcode, a still suck at the job when they get it.

This is FizzBuzz:

1. Output the numbers from 1 to 100

2. If the number is a multiple of 3, write Fizz instead of the number

3. If the number is a multiple of 5, write Buzz instead of the number

4. If the number is a multiple of 3 and 5, write FizzBuzz instead of the number

Does that really sound like something requiring special practice and preparation? Assuming a decent interviewer would help out with the modulo operator if that was unfamiliar

Is it provided as you described or is it more like “please do FizzBuzz”? If it’s the latter, that would explain why some people may have trouble with this task… I think we both agree it’s ridiculous to test if the interviewee knows what FizzBuzz stands for, and yet… let’s just say i know a few people who treat interviews as a jargon recall context.

I don’t know what kind of psychopath would provide a problem with the expectation that you already know the problem by heart

I get the impression you latched on to the word leetcode and took away something very different

FizzBuzz, reversing a sentence -- this is programming your way out of a wet paper bag, not elite and esoteric skills that need advanced study and cramming

Similar concept. You have them do some task like fizzbuzz to see if they can program stuff on the fly that they would never need to do in real life. You practice that since school doesn't prepare you for that unless you do ACM programming contests or something. The interview demands this to see if the candidate is capable of cramming for the interview, which correlates with the effort, ability they could put into the job, not with what the skills they actually apply on the job, which are hard to measure in a one hour interview slot anyways.

If someone doesn't know how to reverse words in a sentence they are absolutely not qualified to be a programmer. Yes they probably won't do this exact task often, but this is like a doctor that can't distinguish heart from the liver. It tells you something has gone horribly wrong.

In many languages, the basic version can be just one line of code, if you know the right libraries to leverage. C# leveraging Linq, for example:

    String.Join(" ",
      String.Split(" ", sentence).Reverse()))

What if the sentence is in Japanese (which doesn’t use spaces)?

Japanese can use spaces and does in some contexts

I agree that some random leetcode-hard problem is not a good indicator, but if you can’t write fizzbuzz or can’t sum an array of integers, you’ve given me important data about your skills as a programmer on that day.

I’ve never had an interview question that asked me to do something straightforward. If I did get a question like that, I would be immediately suspicious about what the catch was.

For campus, we ask very straightforward questions to try to weed out the very lowest of coding fluency at that early stage. (Basically to try to guard against late track changers who haven’t actually coded but know that the SWE market is better than whatever their original interest was.)

If I ask that of a senior candidate, it’s because I got a whiff of “this candidate might not be able to code at all, and I’d like to save us both some time and frustration.”

I don’t know, I still think 22 year old me might still flub even a simple on the fly question (granting that I do my first internship with IBM writing lots of code when I was 20).

If they flub half of the time and go on seven such interviews, they have over a 99% chance to pass at least one of them.

And that’s for someone with only a 50/50 success rate at summing an array of integers. Do you want to hire someone for a software role who is an underdog to be able to sum an array of ints?

Interviews are learning experiences, you get better at it the more often you do them. My first comment in this thread was that this guy was just a learning experience for these students. Summing integers is easy, understanding someone’s rushed description of what they want done along with rushing to code or write a solution on a whiteboard is the hard part.

We ask of every candidate. At least half the time, I wish I'd done so before getting invested in the "experience" portion, when that ends up not actually translating to ability (and believe me, I am trying to help them to succeed)

The beauty is, even a simple exercise answered quickly like "sum of integers" provides ample opportunity to learn a lot about how they think.

Start digging in to testability, requirement changes, etc. Change it to a rolling sum (producing a sequence instead of a single value). Do they use an array or an iterator? Do they output straight to the console, or produce an actual function? Could the numbers come from other sources (database, queue, etc)? What might the tradeoffs be? If there's something they are unfamiliar with, are they quick on the uptake if you explain it? And so on.

Yeah, LeetCode interviews are their own weird universe. Even smart people get wrecked until they realize you have to treat it like an exam. Most failures aren’t about ability, it’s just pattern recall under pressure. I’ve passed some rounds I had no business passing just because I stayed calm. StealthCoder helped me a bit there since it keeps me from blanking during the actual interview.

> FizzBuzz is now a "leetcode question"

>Harvard is happy to churn out a nonzero number of students wholly unprepared for meeting extremely basic expectations for the prototypical job of their chosen degree

From one of my professors who did their graduate work at an Ivy, apparently there are a lot of rich kids who can't be failed because their parents donate so much money to the school. But I don't think Harvard has ever had the best undergraduate reputation (among the Ivies), its more well known for its grad/professional programs.

From the people I know that studied at places like Harvard and Yale (which since I'm Canadian isn't a huge sample size), I've been told that there are essentially two different streams of undergrads there - those on legacy admissions and those who qualified otherwise (either via brains, affirmative action, or other means). I was left with the impression that the legacy admissions are mostly people who've coasted through life. The rest are a full spectrum of people.

Most of Harvard's endowment is via alumni, so it doesn't surprise me in the least they continue with it.

I'm curious about the degree validation thing. Did you or your employer validate the degree before the interview?

> The median grade at Harvard is an A

It’s been 20 years or so since my knowledge was up-to-date, but Oxbridge undergrads used to bitterly complain that their 2:2 (grade C I guess?) wasn’t seen as equivalent to getting a 1st(A?) or 2:1(B) from other good UK unis by graduate schemes and large employers.

Oxbridge workload seemed to be significantly higher for most undergrad degrees than it was at other unis, and the feeling was that an essay a week was required that would have been equivalent to a term’s work at other unis. I only ever heard the Oxbridge side of this, however.

I've worked a lot with Oxbridge and Ivy League folks and there is nothing particularly special about them. An Oxbridge degrees bestows an out-of-the-box premium personal brand, as you've demonstrated, as well as the social network, but not superior ability, in my experience

When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.

The only entity that has ever cared about my college GPA has been other colleges when I signed up for grad school. And even in that case it is just a "stat check" in gamer parlance. 3.0 or greater, yes. Lower, no. That kind of thing.

Zero employers have ever asked to see my college GPA after graduating almost 17 years ago.

As prices for college go up, the student is more of a customer than anything, and therefore the pressure to raise grades goes up. Who is going to go to a college where people tend to need an extra year to graduate, when each year is 60k? Or one where only the top 5% of a class gets a top grade?

You are already seeing grade inflation in the UK too: Go look at the percentage of first class degrees over time.

The only place where a modern US university can be used as a filter is in their own admissions, where they can still be pretty stringent. Harvard could fill their class 6 times with people that are basically indistinguishable from their freshman class, so just getting into the right university already shows that you must have had some skill and maturity by the time you were a junior in high school.

This is also why hiring juniors is so difficult nowadays for software: Having successfully finished a CS degree at most universities says nothing about your ability to write any code at all, or analyze any complex situation. And with the advent of leetcode training, it's not as if you can now tell who happens to be good because they remember their algorithms and data structure classes really well. You have no idea of how good the new grad is going to be when they show to the interview, and even those that pass might not be all that great in practice, as they might just have spent 3 months memorizing interview questions like an automaton.

Yes but it is not standardized at all. Every college has its own way of doing things. Even every degree or school within a university can be different in how they handle grades. Some places put every student on a curve, so that a particular distribution of grades is always enforced. Some places operate on more of a pass/fail basis - often this is done for the first couple years to avoid measuring students when they’re adjusting to a new lifestyle (meaning partying a lot). Some places tend to give out easy grades. So you cannot compare students across different degrees and colleges.

This is the dumbest idea ever because it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones.

> it forces students to take easy classes instead of interesting ones

The UK system doesn't really let students choose which classes to take

I mean even at my supposedly top uni in the UK 60-80% of the class got a first, depending on if a COVID year or not. Like 1% gets a 2:2 or below....

I partied my way through an easy major with nothing to do with my job. The people who didn't have no "superpowers" that I don't. The degree is a bunch of status signalling bullshit.

It sounds like you’ve rationalized your lazy work in college by convincing yourself it wouldn’t have made any difference if you had worked harder.

I don't need to rationalize what is already rational. My degree isn't even related to my job, so why would working harder at it have paid off?

In short, soft skills. It depends on your degree I guess. In an MBA or education program, the distance between try hard and slacker is narrow. In more abstract less career oriented programs, the difference on critical thinking and comm skills is huge. If you can't imagine how deeply studying great works and thinkers improves your mind, that tells me maybe you missed something big.

I'm a software engineer. I have no CS degree. The people who have one aren't any better.

Which strongly suggests that one reason 4-year degrees have lost value, is the piece of paper has lost value. Because of (most?) people only getting a degree for the paper.

Two improvements then: Degrees that earn the reputation of not being given for anything less than excellence in studies. Where the earned reputation is used both to discourage the non-serious, and enhance the value of the degree.

And of course, bring down the costs. Create a high octane alumni network to match. Foster an opinionated high work ethic, college-as-daycare / party-scene repellent culture. Anything and everything rethought from scratch.

For instance, why are degrees based on years? Why so standardized when neither students or jobs are? Why not a skill chart that can be custom traversed per student - with students expected to move on whenever they choose to, or have a good opportunity. A high percentage of students leaving for good jobs after just one year would be a win.

For just one slice of education, to start.

As with anything complex, start with something small and focused. Like a low population cutting edge practice/research AI school. Start from scratch with the thing that is new, challenging and in high demand.

Then expand into other fast changing, high demand areas. Keep figuring out better ways, keep taking on more, keep reducing costs, as long as all three of those efforts tradeoffs are compatible.

You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost too. Nearly all of Europe does, I believe.

Did Europe find a cheat code that gets free $$$ for education?

Nothing is free - once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.

Not saying education should not be subsidized via taxes (I think it's good overall), but it's not free at all - the price is just hidden and spread out over many years (similar to student loans but less visible).

Was it much more subsidized in the US when it was much cheaper, though?

I'd reword the question: "was college paid for via higher income taxes for graduates (and others) or via a more direct approach of student loan taking?". I believe the latter but I don't see the fundamental difference. It's the same student loan but hidden from sight, as it's packaged as higher tax %

> don't see the fundamental difference

You're kidding. The former means all higher net worth individuals to take on both the cost (via taxes) and the benefit (a well-trained workforce for businesses, well-paid, highly taxed contributors for the state, an educated populace of voters, graduates with stable work and in-demand skills). The latter is another example of America's "Everyone for themselves" theme, with students bearing the entire cost of their education, while the graduate, public, state, and businesses reap the benefit.

If the benefits are spread so widely, why shouldn't the cost be?

The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?

My point is that it doesn't matter in principle if one takes a loan and pays it down over time vs. one is taxed at much higher % and that tax "pays down" a phantom student loan of "free" education.

It does introduce a risk and hence the incentive for loan takers to choose their degree wisely though. Which should lead to better allocation of labor but at a cost of some personal risk.

I actually included the graduate as a beneficiary ("a well-paid, highly taxed contributor" or "the graduate" in the counter), but more importantly:

The entirety of society benefits from a well-educated populace. That's one reason even those without children pay for public education.

Following that, if everyone benefits, why is the graduate taking on all the risk (via a non-dischargeable student loan) instead of spreading the risk across the entirety of society?

Ok, I overlooked that.

I think that's fair that risk should be more spread. Comes at a cost of people choosing degrees more frivolously though and wasting their time and everyone's money

I'd like to push back on "useless" degrees here, as well. The idea that degrees that leave graduates struggling to pay their bills (especially with student loans factored in) are worse than degrees that maximize income is bad for society. Not every job that is good for society pays well - if they did, educators would be better paid, and many executives would not be compensated as well as they are.

Some degrees are less in-demand (at time of graduation) economically, but a well-educated populace that can apply critical thinking and remember lessons from history, can be its own reward. Notably, pushing for a population completely lacking these skills is an excellent way to topple a democracy over time.

The pay is determined by supply and demand, apparently there is a relatively large supply of educators (many just enjoy it despite low pay) relative to the demand.

I see your point on broader benefits, however, those are largely speculative while a shortage of e.g. doctors has very direct and concrete costs to the society.

On prior point regarding spreading risks - would you say government should bail out failed entrepreneurs? Because that is very similar in principle (taking risk, benefit for society)

I would struggle to define a truly useless degree though. That's what I'm pushing back on: that learning from our past mistakes, taking in different perspectives from other times, places, and cultures, and learning not only to learn, but to interpret media and think critically, are tremendously important to a healthy society. What you call "frivilous", I would call low-earning.

I'm not saying failed entrepreneurs should be bailed out, even if (through bankruptcy proceedings) they de-facto are. To your point though, they're given tax breaks by my government [0], which aligns with the goals we seem to have agreed are important and good for society at large.

Small businesses are given assistance when starting out and financially vulnerable; financial assistance that is paid for by all members of society, as we all reap the benefits of a stronger economy when they succeed. I'm not sure how one defends not extending the same courtesy to students.

[0] https://taxbreak.ca/bc-business-tax-breaks/

This can only be true if the society gets richer over timer from this process. Considering that EU has actually become poorer and the gap is becoming larger every year passing, your theory of benefits from a well-educated populace is not well funded.

In the EU, the risk has been loaded onto everyone but the benefits are meager at best, and inexistent in practice. This is the typical problem of socialist system where everyone bear the cost but the benefits are only distributed to those in power or those who could manipulate the system for their own benefits.

If that wasn't true, France wouldn't be in the political turmoil and economic disaster that it is today. Unsurprisingly, France has been dominated by marxist adjacent ideologies, co-opted by the "resistants", the real winners of WW2. The US won on the ground but largely lost the ideological battle, we are now seeing the result of that invisible battleground.

> The students bear costs but no benefit to themselves? No higher wages?

Nobody said the student achieves no benefit. We keep saying that the student does not capture all the benefit of their own education in higher wages, but bears the entire cost.

That's also true for entrepreneurs, right?

That's what taxes are for. Subsidizing public good.

Affordable access to good education is a good outcome from the heavy taxation I pay.

For sure. The main benefit is that it allows smart, hardworking but poor students to get a degree and utilize their brainpower productively for the benefit of all. That's great.

Just don't say it's "free" - those who get the education pay back all they got via taxes (which in it's end effect are like paying down a student loan).

Absolutely. I never would say it is "free". But in many ways it is a matter of what one values.

I had opportunities to move to the US and likely make 2x-3x what I make here and pay less taxes. I chose moving to Europe instead. It is the sort of society I prefer to live in.

Free at point of consumption. Anybody with half a brain understands that’s what’s meant when somebody says “free” education or “free” healthcare.

Just going to point out that this is semantic hair-splitting that usually comes from opponents of governments providing for the social welfare. Not saying you're doing that, but it's a thing that happens.

And nobody thinks free education doesn't cost anything, just like people don't think the military doesn't cost anything. Somehow, though, there is endless trillions for "defense", and a little moth flies out of the wallet when it's for something that doesn't involve drones.

People without a degree: Work and pay high taxes for years while their peers are studying, and then continue to pay high taxes to pay for the high salaries of degree holders who used their degrees to get government "jobs".

People with a degree: Get free education and free stipends, then get paid by the tax payers for the rest of their lives in their cushy government "jobs".

Europe has a much lower expenditure per student compared to the US.

https://www.aei.org/articles/the-crazy-amount-america-spends...

It does. In large part due to Baumol's cost disease - higher overall incomes in productive sector like tech drive up costs for sector with low productivity growth - so professors and admin staff in US make 2x salaries compared to Europe (cost of living adjusted). Also, have you seen EU student amenities and dorm sizes?

When you break down how budgets have changed, the two biggest drivers of tuition increases are the growth of administration, and fancy amenities like sports facilities.

The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has not been increasing.

The cost of the person in front of the blackboard has been steadily going down; those people have been complaining about this for decades.

Ok, the prior link was comparing it to EU though, so perhaps costs for professors there went down even more, as professors make less there compared to US

I'm trying to follow you. I don't get how Baumol's has a higher degree of effectiveness in the US than it does in the EU? Are you saying there are more tech companies and therefore tech roles in the US than EU and thus those drive up non-tech wages even though they aren't as productive?

Exactly

I call bullshit on this.

There are lots of reasons why US academics earn so much more than their european counterparts, but the income level of US tech employees is not high on the list, if it is on the list at all.

Also, Baumol's doesn't predict that wages in low productivity growth sectors will rise, it merely notes that the costs in such sectors do not fall, which means that whatever the sector produces (good, services, art etc) become relatively more expensive compared to other production. This is why it appears to cost so much to see the symphony orchestra, even in Cincinnati - it's not that the players all make a ton of money, it's that their productivity is flat, so the costs of the performance appear to rise relative to, say, toothpaste.

I asked Gemini 3 if your statement is true and got this, as expected: "That statement is false. In fact, the prediction that wages will rise in low-productivity sectors is the central mechanism of Baumol’s Cost Disease"

Somebody asked Gemini 3 yesterday about a piece of music I was looking for. It said:

> Based on the details you provided—specifically the overlap with the poem "AM" (from Be Bop or Be Dead) and "Set The Tone" (from Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science)—the track you are most likely looking for is: "Music" by DeadbEAT (featuring Umar Bin Hassan) Released in 1992/1993 on the album Wild Kingdom, this track was a cult hit in the acid jazz/trip-hop scene of the 90s and later appeared on compilations like the influential Red Hot + Cool (1994).

Very good, except that there is no album called "Wild Kingdom" by an artist named Deadbeat, and while Hassan does appear on "Red Hot + Cool" it is on a differently named track written by himself.

So forgive me if I call bullshit on Gemini 3 as well.

However, in this instance, it is a correct summary of the most visible popular summaries of Baumol's cost disease, so there's that.

I don't think it captures the essence of what Baumol (& Bowen) were writing about, but I accept that my presentation was misleading.

LLM hallucinations are still a thing for ultra niche topics. Not a problem for topics that have sizeable wiki pages, like Baumol Effect. Here is the first paragraph from wiki: "...tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth"

The problem with this summary is that it's not actually what Baumol & Bowen were really focused on in their original paper.

It is what most people nowadays connect with "Baumol's cost disease", but in their paper, the way in which rising productivity sectors cause wage increases in stable productivity sectors was more of a detail than the central part of their thesis. The core part was the observation that certain kinds of economic activity cannot reduce costs through productivity gains, while others can; the wage connection between them was, well, not an afterthought, but more of a consequence of the very specific sort of economic system we live in. One could imagine a society with different ways of distributing resources to labor that didn't really have this feature, and yet the same sectors of this imaginary society's would still suffer from "Baumol's cost disease".

EU universities, the amenities are quite meager, as they should be. But for dorms it’s usually single occupancy. Unlike the US where you’re expect to have roommates.

The roommates thing is just part of the socialization of US universities, since many kids are not living anywhere near home and if they aren't forced to become close friends with someone by, say, sleeping right next to them, they often go a little nuts. By the time you are an upperclassman you are generally given your own room or you live off campus.

I've done the US university dorm living. I was already pretty well socialized being involved in many social causes and clubs. Unlike the movies, my roommate and I didn't turn into lifelong friends. Our living arrangement was strictly business. Now, I am lifelong friends with my apartment roommates. We shared a house together but did not share a room.

Also, campus ties you closer to home more than you imagine. They shutdown campus for different breaks and you're more or less forced to go elsewhere, which is typically your family home.

But honestly, double and triple occupancy rooms are completely unnecessary and uniquely American.

>I am lifelong friends with my apartment roommates. We shared a house together but did not share a room.

It depends entirely on the person. I had a similar thing happen to me, except that I managed to get a single my first couple years of school. But I know from others, that it often creates a very intimate, fraternal bond which gives kids some semblance of a family bond before they are able to get a real social life, join clubs, make friends, find a partner etc.

Is it necessary for there to be student amenities paid for by the school? Why should tuition pay for a bunch of ancillary nice-to-haves instead of, ya know, the education?

It's not. But apparently that's what most American students demand and universities supply to satisfy the demand.

Public schools shouldn't oblige and instead offer the lower cost option. The market will then sort this issue out in a few years. Right now its public = expensive and private = absurdly expensive

Because schools are in competition with one another to attract students (who have the ability to broadcast applications to multiple schools). The campus life factor is a major part of a student’s decision.

Put yourself into the student’s shoes. If you had the choice between two schools of otherwise roughly equal academic reputation but one offered luxurious residences while the other housed students like medieval monks, which would you choose?

From what I understand European education and degree programs are typically much more structured and narrow, and thus finish a lot faster. A student who finishes K-Ph.D. in the US will have a lot more breadth of exposure than such a student in most of Europe, if I recall what I read on the topic a while ago correctly.

When used in a social context, "free" has a different meaning than in many other contexts. It does not mean, for example, "there is no cost for this thing". Rather, it means "the person receiving this thing is not responsible for paying the costs associated with it (at least not at the time)".

Free health care doesn't mean "nobody gets paid to provide health care", it means "patients do not pay for health at the point of service".

If you'd prefer that we use some other term to describe this, please suggest it. I do find it interesting that the Scottish NHS uses "No fees at point of service" as part of their branding (or did, back in 2019).

The taxation is conditional on earning enough income though, which aligns incentives better.

> once you graduate you are hit with 50% tax that gets back all you "free" tuition costs many, many times over.

This is plain false.

In EU? What is false about it? I paid the 50% income tax after getting my "free education"

> You can provide the piece of paper at a fraction of the cost

This isn’t socially useful.

And what we're doing now is? Telling 17-year-olds to take on six figures of debt and then replacing them with ChatGPT while making it impossible to discharge their debt?

Just because Comp Sci and many STEM degrees in general are losing value does not mean that university overall is not worthwhile.

Does it really not, when many of the other degrees already lost their value a long time ago?

Not sure what you mean by that, many other degrees still have plenty of value because they teach "soft skills" that are more broadly applicable and more difficult to automate. Hard skills always get automated away.

The question is not “does it provide any value whatsoever?” The question is “does a degree provide surplus value to society, given its costs?”

This is not something that can be measured ahead of time, what someone does with their education.

What is obvious and what would be hugely socially useful would be to have a completely online, completely free accredited option for degrees that don't need labs. That would cause downward pressure on all of tuition outside the top universities.

The price of college at this point is a ridiculous value proposition to the average student. Who cares about the top students and the most gifted people. They will be fine regardless. The average student is getting crushed and ripped off blind.

Ripping off entire generations of young people is really stupid and is going to have devastating long run social consequences.

That's easily solved with labor market reform. First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field.

Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.

Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.

Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.

I... can't tell if this is satire or not.

This sounds like those UChicago people who were floating the idea of sponsoring immigrants with cash (read: indentured servitude)

Bank could lend out money to students, with the future college degree as security. After graduation, the student either gets a job that requires that degree, or licenses that degree to another person or to an institution which collects degrees and licenses them on one or several degree licensing marketplaces. Most would use these third-party re-licensers to simplify the paperwork. For example when a company needs to license a degree for a temporary project of just a few months, or when a degree holder takes leave from their own job for let's say three months. Then she can have some income from renting out her degree during that time.

I'm sure you've already thought about the problem of students who have mortgaged their future degree, but do not graduate for some reason. What happens to the money the bank has invested? This problem is mitigated and solved by packing these degree mortgages into Credit default swaps to hedge the risk. Since most students will graduate and be a return on the investment, we will pack all degree mortgages into investment funds, and offer them on the international financial markets, with sophisticated leverage tools. So, investors will not feel the pain if 1 out of 10 students do not finish their degrees, that will be very much offset by those who do - especially when leverage is used.

This is how we solve social and environmental issues, make education affordable to everybody, create a great investment boom, and make the younger generations stakeholders in the economy. Smart parents would take advantage of degree mortgages for very low monthly rates if they sign them for their child already during pregnancy, meaning they could even be paid off before graduation. That's a good start in life!

The people who can be replaced by ChatGPT are the ones who treated their time in college as "just getting a piece of paper". They paid handsomely for a chance at drinking from the fountain of knowledge and instead did a rinse and spit.

That doesn't have prestige value. Prestige comes from scarcity and the ability to exclude the lower caste.

If people want to play those exclusivity games that's up to them. What's wrong is asking the taxpayer to fund it under the false mask that the entire product is education.

The scarcity in Europe (at least the two countries I'm familiar with) comes from a standardized test. If you don't do well on the test, you don't go to college.

America used to do that, but Jewish students started taking (and doing well on) the test, and later Black and Asian students had the audacity to be brilliant too. This led to America's "holistic" college admissions process.

For what it's worth, the USA isn't unique in adapting admissions to reject an unwanted minority. The most interesting mechanism has to be Moscow State University's Jewish Problems: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556

The Chinese national entrance exam (gaokao?) is notoriously grueling, but doing well pretty much guarantees you a spot in a top university. Would have been useful to me, having grabbed a middle-of-the-road SAT score for Ivies but having failed to apply to one. There's definitely a multi-pronged strategy for ensuring exclusivity.

That's not exactly true. Funnily enough, you are extremely dependent on your sociological background. If you come from a poor family and do very well, you'll get a full ride for sure. But if you do well but come from a well-off family that refuse to pay for your education, you are fucked. It's only university attendance that is (mostly) free. you still need to finance housing and life costs. Since most good universities are in expensive cities and student loans are not much of a thing, it is an extremely selective process that targets both class standing (from a money standpoint) and parental implication.

There was a study on one of the most selective school in France and actually diversity of background has gone down in the last 20 years. Europe is highly politicised and it was always about selecting for ideologically compatible behavior. Otherwise education wouldn't need so much government intervention/support, even if said education would be paid for by the taxpayer (everyone could get some amounts of credits, that they could spend on their institution of choice).

Most prestigous colleges are profitable and don't need the funding or the tuition

I think most people (namely high school seniors) go to college for neither. They go because that was the expectation, and was assumed to be at least approximately productive path.

While arguably that's indirectly 'for the piece of paper', I'd argue the pleasant experience is a factor too, even if not quoted as such. i.e. if it was a purely rational, economic choice (my interpretation of going to college just for the degree) we'd see higher enrollment in high-ROI majors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com