Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation.

If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem even worse.

These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

View on HN

>If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost

It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

indeed. a certification is required for ~every non-manual-labor job. even if not listed as a requirement, you're almost certainly competing against people with degrees.

so, the primary function of going to school is to get a job, not for self enrichment.

Manual labor jobs require certifications in today's world as well.

It's a shit show everywhere.

All time.

> These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

Spot on. I am teenager going to college soon and I feel like the same way about the education system (and in extension, the job market but I suppose that the job market might be more understanding probably over all of it), part of my comment was as follows.

I do feel a bit like coding/a lot of fun-ness out of life is also like this, quantified, measured, transactional (posting for social-media?) [as I wonder if I am writing this comment for hackernews karma or relevant discussion talking points..]

This feels to me the most irreversible consequence because it might be hard for the generation (myself included) to see value in non-measurable things as everything has to be measured and transactional-ized.

(...) I would like for humanity to be more nuanced and less measured but more varied (grey rather than black or white) but I feel like that there is enough noise on the internet that maybe even this ends up becoming noise and I am not sure if anyone who might benefit from reading this actually does end up reading it.

From one of my comments that I had written sometime ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47559013

This particular battle for learning was lost a long time ago. If university stopped providing an earnings boost from attending, 90% of students would quit tomorrow.

It doesn’t help that a lot of desirable fields are comically out of date at the academic instructional level anyway.

Would you honestly tell an aspiring software engineer that your typical computer science degree will teach them much about wielding computers in a cutting edge way?

If I were to list the top 5 things I got from university, knowledge wouldn’t make the cut and were I to do it again, I would certainly attend less class.

Anyone who thinks that a Computer Science degree is supposed to prepare them for a job as a Software Engineer has completely missed the point. It's like getting a Physics degree for a job as a Mechanical Engineer. There is some overlap but a huge difference in focus on theoretical versus practical topics.

My computer science degree did not cover much actual computer science.

You can argue about whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but the ship sailed long ago. CS undergrad degrees are about training software engineers, not about training computer scientists.

> If university stopped providing an earnings boost from attending, 90% of students would quit tomorrow.

Maybe 10–20% would quit for that reason. There would be more attrition if you could get common jobs (such as teacher or nurse) that currently require a degree but don't pay that well without formal education.

Most people don't care that much about money. Sure they would like to have more money, but it's not the primary factor that drives their major life decisions. People are generally more interested in stable careers that pay their bills and seem like something they could continue doing until retirement.

More and more colleges are saying they will cancel your degrees if they retroactively detect AI cheating. This will be hysterical.

AI isn't the issue as much how AI is used. Passive use of any tech, including social media, and now AI is lazy and has poor outcomes.

Aligning AI use with the goals of all sides, and not just one side getting paid, or just one side graduating could look different.

Most people attend higher education to access opportunity to improve their lives, overwhelmingly for a career and earning.

The idea of higher education teaching "learning how to think" is perhaps a relic of the origin of some universities which didn't historically do STEM, and focused on things like liberal arts, which in turn often had the support of coming from a privileged background, or financial safety net.

STEM money and funding though, attached a lot of traditional post secondaries to do that as well.

It's perfectly acceptable to expect higher education of any kind to have you ready to grow and earn more in better suited opportunities. Not enough educational institutaions don't publish their % of students who graduate in the area that they started in, and also the % of graduates who find their next step, career wise, etc, in 6-12 months of education.

It is very difficult for them to prove the allegation of AI cheating. If you didn't cheat, you should fight. You have legal rights, and you don't have to roll over. I represent students who have been unfairly accused of AI cheating. Properly defended, it is not that easy for the school to win.

I have found the whole honor system of academics to be just another stick to whip students with when convenient. I am not opposed to any sort of honor system or academic integrity when there is actual honor and integrity, but the system needs to apply to both sides. None of this "rules for thee, but not for me."

There are more modern exhaustive ai scanners that are far beyond the dated software being sold to institutions.

Universities can be good at buying things to maintain the status quo and past. The issue with AI based software is it must actually keep pace. The tooling in this space does not seem to be.

You mean the same colleges that used AI proctoring during 2020 that had a lot of horror stories of false positives, like a guy passing in a window in the back of the student or another student that was not looking 100% of the time to the screen?

Haha, I remember that. Tech salespeople will always take advantage of non-tech buyers, especially academics who won't listen to anyone and believe they can do it better themselves, or manage it with policy and words alone.

Imagine software being bought and sold by both parties nodding.

>Most people attend higher education to access opportunity to improve their lives, overwhelmingly for a career and earning.

I think that's the presumption that might be at the heart of the problem.

People have come to believe that their lives are improved by having more things instead of making themselves better.

>The idea of higher education teaching "learning how to think" is perhaps a relic

I worry that this is might have been a causal step involved in producing the current state of the world.

The purpose of the university has always been certification.

“You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

- Will Hunting

Not always [1]

Having gone to university in Germany, there are glimpses of this ideal, but they're mostly faint memories enshrined on faded plaques around the campus. I did have an old geezer prof (90+ years old) that went to the very same university over half a century ago and showed us his diploma: greek, latin, humanities, ... for a technical diploma, no less!

I do still cringe a little when we get newjoiners fresh out of university proudly proclaiming "Yeah, no can do, we didn't learn that at university". Yes, obviously, university is not an apprenticeship. You learn how to learn and then apply that to unknown-to-you problems. Oddly enough ChatGPT seems to have brought a change to that mindset, but Im not sure if it did so for the better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

Do let us know where we can find a chemistry lab or biology lab or the facilities used for various other engineering undergraduates in a public library.

How about nuclear physics? Every undergraduate has access to the fission materials, right?

Student doesn't need a specialized laboratory to learn things.

Several universities, including MIT, do have their own nuclear reactor on site for teaching and research.

Just buy old clocks and extract the uranium in them...

Those are for the grad students and faculty.

Having taken lab classes for undergraduates extensively, I assure you they're not.

Maybe liberal arts students and programmers can self-educate at a public library but many STEM fields cannot.

That is utter bs. Even if that quote would only be meant for insane geniuses, it would still be debatable.

It’s a movie, let’s go back to reality.

You are aware that good will hunting is a movie from 1997, yes?

The author mentions the notion of a "permanent underclass." What that looks like relative to your comment is this: more enterprising students (usually, but not always, from privileged upbringings) will learn how to develop the restraint to use AI as an assistant and a learning aid, while the vast majority use AI as an easy button.

Except it's actually worse than that because the big AI providers with billions on the line are actively encouraging their users to use their services as easy buttons. If they weren't, Googlebook wouldn't have a Magic Cursor/Clippy as a Service feature that suggests using Gemini when you jiggle your cursor over something, and Google Docs wouldn't insert a "Write for me?" CTA when you stop typing.

For US undergrad, with all the resources available online, going to university just for education doesn't justify the high tuition. Research is mostly limited to graduate school anyways.

The course material isn’t really what your undergrad tuition pays for.

You’re paying to be surrounded by smart kids that will ensmarten you too and for access to the school’s career networks.

Abbreviated:

- Surrounded by other kids who have access to the same internet you do

- Access to the school's career networks (LinkedIn)

I will challenge anyone who thinks they can get an equivalent quality of undergrad education and access to career services remotely.

Lol, nice to meet you. Left freshman year, got paid, got out. Questions welcome. College for tech jobs became useless after like 2008. Books are cheap. I'd challenge anyone in response to prove they got a degree in the 21st century.

Me: Math PhD, found an internship through my school's internal postings (company has something of an intern -> employee pipeline from my school), interned for a couple summers, got hired after graduation. And yes, it is mostly a tech job, not a math one. I was hired three years ago.

This is not at all what most students go to undergrad for.

For some reason in discussions like this, things are always framed as if everyone is going to Yale.

Everyone I know including myself, went to college because that is just what you were supposed to do. That was my mom's dream for me to get a degree and I didn't want to disappoint my mom.

I am sure there were really smart kids in my high school that were figuring out post graduate network strategy but that was hardly the majority.

I even had a friend that dropped out of high school that ended up going to community college. He wasn't exactly figuring out the eigenvector centrality of the nodes of his general studies classmates.

Correct. Social pressure is what pushes most people there.

As a result of this social pressure, people do tend to go off the rails when there (having fun) very few give a fck about studying - who cares, there's no reward for getting anything beyond 60-70%.

This is mythology. I went to a very high ranked uni and this is not what any of my classmates were interested in either - it was all about getting drunk and pulling all nighters a few weeks before exams.

Career networks? Hahaha. Very few benefitted from that.

Once again, I went to a top 3 ranked uni on many league tables worldwide.

>You’re paying to be surrounded by smart kids that will ensmarten you too and for access to the school’s career networks.

If you're paying and it isn't for a new campus building with your family's name on it, then you're not going to have access to those things at all.

Suuuuure, you're going to be able to access some sort of 'career' network. You'll be able to find amazing and high-paying jobs such as... um... uh...

Also for deadlines and social accountability. There's a reason why there was a lot less learning during the pandemic. The simple fact that most online learning advocates don't want to acknowledge is that humans learn better from other humans in person. On average, of course.

This is one of those things that seems true in theory but doesn't have examples of success. There are people who self-study advanced mechanics at home, but they're child prodigies and enjoy (typically) going to universities as a way of meeting others who share some interests.

What made University of California Santa Cruz so attractive to undergraduates in the 70s was no grading of performance and engagement but instead written evaluations. I loved being able to concentrate on great subjects with the help of often excellent teachers and TAs. Swathmore is noted for this culture too.

>These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

Hear, hear!

Is learning something while you plagiarising someone’s work to submit as your own coursework should also be an excuse to allow plagiarism?

> These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured.

What other kind of culture is there? A culture of not measuring?

A culture rooted in φιλοσοφία (greek, philosophia in Latin). So yes, I meant that literally. There were times, already 2500 years ago, where people wanted to study to become wiser.

I'll throw my two cents in, this still exists today. The difference between now and then is that now a college degree is seen as a requirement for a higher quality of life. (And not in a eudaimonia way)

Many people are going to college primarily to make more money in their adult life, the actual learning is secondary. If you're already well-off or just don't care, you can still get the education for its own sake.

The issue is that we've created a perverse incentive to get a college degree.

It's great when you're a wealthy noble and have time to do luxury things.

For almost all of history, higher education has been a luxury good for the rich, including the Greek city states. There have been a few exceptions, most notably European countries with tax funded schools, but even those are primarily pumping out degrees used for chasing jobs.

The point of modernity was to broaden access and opportunity for everyone, not just the rich.

What we got instead was a regression to aristocracy, where critical social resources of all kinds were enclosed and captured by capital and financialisation.

The result is a lot of very broken systems, education being just one.

Universities became primarily about administration of property and income, and the educational element has become a form of marketing to attract money (and bodies) so the rest could function.

And now we're on the edge of the next stage, which isn't "What is education for?" but "What are humans for?"

We used to know. Or at least we used to believe we knew.

Now we don't any more.

Oh yeah, I can just imagine a line of people wanting to learn Strength of Materials course for fun, or anything equally crazy (requiring at the same time fresh knowledge of other hard uni courses as a prerequisite, a lot of strict rigor in studying and just pure baseline intellect to get it at all). One can learn Latin for fun, starting from literally zero and stop any arbitrary level too. One can't learn ANY hard STEP topic without doing that continuously on a progression. If god forbid you take a gap in studying STEM courses, in a decade you will have to restart from school program again :) .

PS: I get all the idealistic mulling about how universities should be these utopian centers for the voluntary knowledge study and collaboration and the only result should be merit based. But real world doesn't work like that. If a country wants to have professional chemists or say welders for example, it must force kids through a lot of boring and hard mandatory study for years. Humanity didn't invent anything better yet, sorry.

Read the last four words of the sentence you quoted. You'll find your answer.

Seems like a bit of a pipe dream, no?

How does anything scale if you don't know how good or bad it is?

How good is your kids school? How good is your business's supplier? Is this restaurant worth eating at? Am I getting underpaid? Etc

I did not say no measurement, I said favouring the measurement over what is measured.

It's declaring that you will buy the fastest car you see today and then someone delivering one from low earth orbit.

    favouring measurement

But the measurement is the only way to know how a thing is? What it is like? Whether it's this way or that way?

I'm not saying every method of measuring or every metric is equal, but there is no way to seriously engage with something without measuring it...?

The alternative is... what... vibes? Anecdotes? Taking the salesman at their word? Trusting that people just do the right thing all the time?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com