Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College | Hacker News Reader

Venture Capital's Massive, Terrible Idea For The Future Of College

theawl.com

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I disagree with the whole idea that lower quality is such an awful thing. I feel like the entire article is written through a well-educated American lens that doesn't understand why this is so revolutionary.

This has nothing to do with people who are already in universities, it has to do with all the other intelligent people, all around the world who have never had the benefit of a high quality education. And I suppose, the people in America who never had that opportunity either. To deny them that and force them to wait for some sort of 'high quality' education to come their way is ludicrous.

These sites aren't perfect but they will get better and nobody is arguing that they are amazing or that one day they will come to replace the experience of being on campus, but they are a great substitute for people who can't afford that.

Smartphones aren't exactly a replacement for mainframe computers but they're doing a great job at bringing computing to a huge number of people who are using it as a gateway to the web and all that offers. I think that's a good thing.

It's not even about being "lower quality". It's about building another medium for learning outside of highly expensive brick and mortar institutions.

I'm a huge fan of MOOCs. It makes no sense that everyone in America should aspire to getting a 120K bachelor's degree - a university education isn't meant for every career or person or life stage. I think we have this false belief that every American should aspire to getting a university education when in reality, the ROI of a university education is not always net positive. I've seen so many colleagues struggle with huge debt from graduate programs that did did nothing for their career prospects.

And it's not even that - learning shouldn't start or stop at a certain age. For example, I'm in my late 20s and wanted to learn how to build web apps. I like learning in structured environment, so Udacity worked perfectly for me. In 3 months I took an intro Python course and then a web app course led by a Reddit co-founder.

Would I have learned better through an undergrad university course? Maybe. Could I? It'd be pretty much unfeasible, given I was working 50+ hours for a tech firm and commuting between SF and South Bay at the time.

Anything that helps people learn is a good thing.

Yes. I took some Coursera classes and it was better than reading the relevant Wikipedia articles in terms of how much I learned and retained. Net win for education IMO.

The argument you are using privileges one aspect (greater access) above the whole (quality, depth of understanding, mastery etc).

The author is arguing (rightly) that the current system is a pass for educational 'meh - good enough' when we should and must try to get HIGH quality education to everyone.

A lot of proponents of MOOCs, argue that it is an improvement over what we have - that more people are going to be able to learn and be exposed.

This is fundamentally flawed as it as an over-optimistic assesment of the results.

MOOCs will have 2 outcomes

1) They will be great for auto didacts, and they will be the leading edge of subscribers and proponents.

2) They will become certification factories which prove that you can solve X test material (not subject matter) at the end of it.

Would you be OK with Math being considered the same as mental parlor tricks? Differentiation being reduced to knowing steps to carry out? Or History being reduced to rote learning?

I suspect that you will say NO, as would most people understand education to be the same as Knowing and understanding something, not being able to remember it like you would a song stuck in your head.

MOOCs can only go so far - and this is their weakness and the issue educators are trying to point out.

Having seen the philosophy of "good enough" applied to an entire country first hand, I assure you the outcome is misery. Cynical students who realize that getting an answer and learning are no longer happening, and all that matters is acing that test.

A good quality education is expensive. But the side effects of having an educated population (as opposed to literate and trained) is immense.

Half assing this is having engineers, who couldn't do R and D if his life depended on it, and instead he can create value by picking up a phone and saying "Hi this is Sammy speaking".

all the other intelligent people, all around the world who have never had the benefit of a high quality education

But the article's whole point is that all those people will not be getting an education at all; what they'll be getting is something else that shouldn't even be called by that name.

Your analogy with smartphones just reinforces that impression: most of the people who use smartphones or tablets aren't using them to do "computing", they're using them to do the same mindless things they did before smartphones and tablets came along, just more "efficiently".

> what they'll be getting is something else that shouldn't even be called by that name.

Tell me you wore a monocle while typing that

This is an attack piece, and a bad one at that. It's the same, weak attack anti-MOOC people always make which involves a few anecdotal smears on a few of Salman Khan's lectures, a completely false claim that MOOCs are trying to do no more than drive empty facts into students' heads, and an anecdotal filled, rose-tinted, hand-waving defense of the value of a traditional college education. I hear the same weak arguments raised against remote working. People love to extol the virtues of face-to-face communication and intangible experiences, all in the defense of stale traditions and broken, out of date models, but they rarely have any practical solutions for bringing education to the masses that doesn't involve spending an ever increasing amount of money.

We live in a time where information is more abundant and accessible than ever, yet the old guard are doing everything they can to keep it locked up in ivory towers to be doled out bit by bit, in person, for a hefty fee, to anyone willing to rack up tens of thousands of dollars of debt. After all, that money is the only thing keeping the old guard afloat. It's always fascinating to hear the swan song disrupted industries. First they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then, they fade away.

Mass distribution of learning material has been around for a few centuries and has yet to replace the process of guided learning. The problem is simple: while it's possible to amass facts and skills from reading and listening, it's much more difficult to produce complex works of value without feedback on the process.

Doing mathematics isn't just applying rules and techniques. It's about knowing how to reason, and writing a proof in a way which communicates your reasoning clearly to others. You can get started by following along with proofs from a lecture, but in order to really ingrain the techniques in your brain, you have to write proofs of things you've never encountered before. Someone has to read those proofs, and give feedback on where your reasoning was unclear, incomplete, or flawed. They can suggest a different notation, or a shorter path to the same solution. Good teachers will leave notes: "this is a cool idea you've developed here, and it points towards this area of complex analysis we haven't talked about yet."

In psychology it's not enough to memorize a summary text and a smattering of papers. You need to be asked questions. "There's a critical flaw in this paper's sampling methodology. Can you find it? How would you improve it?" "What kind of systematic bias can we expect in these results?" If nobody asks those questions, and helps you hone in on the answers, you'll miss out on half the text. You'll be unprepared to evaluate the quality of others research--or to design experiments of your own.

This process can't be automated yet. Human beings have to read and respond to your work, preferably at interactive latencies.

There absolutely can be a feedback loop. Look no further than the many self taught programmers that frequent HN. Effective learning can and does happen without high paid PHD level professors, large marble floored auditoriums, and football stadiums.

I don't claim the necessity of high paid professors, auditoriums, or football stadiums, but I'm dubious that autodidacticism is a broadly applicable strategy in isolation.

The best teachers in my life have been public high school teachers, parents, six year olds, tenured professors, and other students. I've taught myself, learned by building, learned from working alongside peers, and learned from formal schooling. None is complete in itself--every time I think I'm proficient in a field because of my self-taught experience, a good teacher comes along and shows me how much I don't know; and vice versa, you never truly understand a skill learned from someone else until you've built something with it, on your own.

Guided learning doesn't have to happen in a classroom, but I do believe feedback is essential.

This is nothing new, through history there has been a large range of people who have self taught from books. However, and I agree with the basic point, many people have failed to self-educate through books, and it is not clear to me these people will suddenly do much better with MOOC.

MOOCs are much more directed than just picking up a book.

I really don't get things like Coursera et. al. Textbooks have been available for purchase far before the modern university existed, but the only thing stopping people from teaching themselves and making a career out of it is the degree. I would far prefer a site that just made certifying knowledge of a given subject easier, replacing the BA, so you can cover e.g. Multivariable Calculus over three weeks instead of three months. As it stands, these online "schools" don't offer anything that you couldn't get before, and in fact are perhaps worse because they offer the illusion of having proof of knowledge (when people would be far better served just proving that they know something outright with personal projects).

Furthermore, there are vast areas of education that require small student:teacher ratios, if only for grading papers. Peer reviews can only go so far, and they are really only good for the center two quartiles of the class: who the hell grades the top person? How does she improve? And don't even mention the performance and studio arts.

I think we (and the founders of these places) have a somewhat warped perception of how effective these courses are because our subject areas (math-heavy) are extremely easy to test and quantify progress, but the other subjects are just as critical to society's well-being.

And let's not forget the other side of school: learning work ethic, forging an identity, and how to function in society. Physical colleges are worth far more than the sum of their parts (though probably not what they are charging).

I would love to be proven wrong!

EDIT: I think we would get a much, much, much larger return on the investment by improving the quality of our community colleges, reducing the stigma of attending them & other state schools, and encouraging more people to attend vocational schools instead of a degree that won't get them a job.

I agree with some parts of your post, such as the challenges of evaluating students in more qualitative disciplines through a virtual medium, and disagree with others, such as the notion that the college experience, if I'm reading this right, is the optimal way to forge an identity, function in society etc. etc.

But I think the edit is the most important point here. I really think community colleges, vocational training, and a focus on helping young people evaluate their ambitions in life should be a goal of our society in the coming years. Too many people clog up universities studying things like business and psychology because they've been told it's "the next step."

I believe most people would be happier and less indebted if they were given a cheaper, and arguably more valuable vocational education, job training, and a career, which would enable them to buy stuff, raise children, and stay out of debt, which is enough for a lot of people to be happy.

Furthermore, I think this would spell the end for a lot of colleges and universities I feel serve no purpose except to employ educators and swindle students. I mean, do we really need UC Merced and Cal State Stanislaus? What do these institutions accomplish? I'm sorry if this is an offensive or glib point, I readily admit I'm a bit inebriated at the moment, but I'm just not sure why we have these "in between" schools. Are these guys better off than the people at the CCs? I just don't think so.

> is the optimal way to forge an identity, function in society etc. etc.

Well, pretty close. I'm against saying one thing is optimal for everyone, but I think that it is better for many people than going straight into the work force. I'm 100% positive it could be replaced by something else, non-academic, but I'm not sure what it is. The person who does is probably a genius.

> Physical colleges are worth far more than the sum of their parts

I hear this and variants of this argument often but it always seems to be taken completely on faith.

> I hear this and variants of this argument often but it always seems to be taken completely on faith.

Current college student; I've dropped out of college and returned. So, for me, college has been, is, and will probably continue to be the worth more than just what I am paying for (though I am probably overpaying for those parts). This certainly does not apply to everyone, but I think it does apply to many people.

A very well reasoned piece. It reminds me of this piece from Hamilton Nolan: http://gawker.com/5968116/hubris-high-socks-and-other-habits...

Personally I find the whole techno-libertarian/utopian side of valley culture quite scary - I guess it's the part where some people decide they want to "fix" everything, without really making any effort to understand what (if anything) is broken to begin with.

I'm skeeved out by technolibertarianism too, but I disagree that this is a well-reasoned piece. It's a guilt- by- ideological- association hit piece that at one point has its cake and smears it all over its own face by linking Coursera/Udacity to Michelle Rhee and the scandals of low quality classroom education. It's quick to toss in references to "Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists" or throw Khan Academy under one or more imagined busses, but did you notice that in its attempt at a takedown on an "overview of US history" video at Khan, it didn't even ask the question of how coherently secondary school courseware handled the same subject?

I feel like the reviews I've read from subject matter experts on Coursera courses have been positive. I don't feel like individual problem courses on Udacity damn the whole medium. I can understand how people who thoroughly enjoyed their years at college would feel threatened by alternative paths to the same goal, but it's the goal that matters, not the college life experience.

> but did you notice that in its attempt at a takedown on an "overview of US history" video at Khan, it didn't even ask the question of how coherently secondary school courseware handled the same subject?

My theory: that would probably be an article unto itself. A good friend of mine, who's a 7th grade social studies teacher, shares the author's disdain for Khan's handling of history. He cited disjointed events, without any explaination of how they were connected, stating it was very "this happened, then this happened, then later THIS happened probably because of this which happened between this and this..." -- no coherent historical narrative, and ultimately more difficult to understand. It's easier to remember events when you understand their causes and purpose, rather than just their place on a timeline.

After watching Khan's Intro to CS videos, I'm inclined to trust my friend's assessment.

As far as Rhee is concerned: The crux of the argument is, ambition non-educators who try to "fix" education have a tendancy to make it worse. Rhee and the VCs fall into the same category. It's also worth noting Education reform movement has started to turn its sights on higher education as well- We got a taste of that from Bill Gates, which his thoughts on college rankings (Which probably need to be fixed, but not in the way Gates, and reformers, are proposing).

I have a son in 8th grade and a daughter in 6th in a pretty good school system and I do not assume the social studies curricula is doing a better job at this material than Khan is. The kids in these classes are getting series of disjointed factual units punctuated by enrichment exercises that, while more engaging than Khan Academy, are still merely forestalling the point where the kids actually learn history, by reading books that seriously engage multiple perspectives on what happened.

The point then is that it's awfully silly to single out a very basic Khan US history overview, and disingenuous to do so without putting Khan into context; Khan is not supplanting genuinely meaningful middle school history curricula.

Equally importantly: nobody currently uses just Khan academy for junior high history lessons. Khan is not part of a plot to eliminate teachers.

I don't know where you're going with this Rhee stuff. Rhee may or may not have made education worse in the District, because she ran the school system. But Udacity and Coursera do not run K-12 school systems; they have nothing whatsoever to do with Rhee.

History is just facts. Narratives are usually made up by someone investigating those facts. Narratives differ between historians depending on their sympathies.

I think innovative education should stay away from history. Most of it is history of politics. Only some percentage of it is actual knowledge and none of it is of any use to almost anyone.

You should elaborate on this idea. If we can understand better why the study of history is largely useless, then we might be able to use that knowledge to reason about why other subjects held dear by traditional academics are also harmful. I think literature is even worse than history. What they are studying are not even facts! Just make believe stories. There is no ROI on make believe nonsense, right?

I'm not saying that history is harmful, only that it's mostly useless. I have nothing against literature. I like fiction and discussing fiction. I think people educated in literature might contribute to culture by inventing interesting stories themselves by reusing and remixing concepts found in respected literature.

I don't really like the prominence given to history of politics as it's currently taught because for me it's just uninteresting fiction that only strong point is that something similar perhaps sort of happened.

Most of the classes I've taken have been great. They are certainly comparable to in-person college courses and have delivered incredible value to people world wide at a very small cost per student.

It's all advantages with no disadvantages.

This disruptive model of course is an absolute terror to the large number of poor teachers and colleges providing substandard classes while saddling their students with debt.

It's no wonder that on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, a ridiculous and contrived hit piece is published by those from the dinosaur set who are in the process of being obsoleted because they can't keep up with progress and are unwilling to retool.

I did the original ai-class, plus a couple from coursera, and a couple from udacity. I also have a bachelor's degree.

The quality of learning from these online courses totally trumped my in-person degree. For me, the ability to rewind certain parts of the lectures over and over was incredibly useful, and I was able to save time running certain parts at 2-5x speed. The use of pop-up quizzes every 5 minutes really forced me to learn the material. The fact that the content was produced for online presentation made a big difference compared to simply recording a traditional lecture.

Udacity and other online courses are great for people that already know how to learn. These sorts of programs won't help people that don't know how to learn on their own. However, I will say I can count the classes in college that couldn't have been replicated in an online format on two hands. All of theses classes still could have benefited from putting lectures online. The thing that is lacking in online courses is in-depth, in-person discussion in settings of about 30 people. Forums like this are great for teaching critical thinking. My favorite class in college was an undergraduate anthropology class that focused on a different topic each week. There were two different perspectives (in journal articles) and you'd be assigned one to defend in the next class. I think this kind of thing is hard to replicate in digital settings. Thoughts?

30 people is a completely arbitrary number, arrived at not because it was the optimal class size, but because of resource constraints.

It's absolutely arbitrary, but it's a small enough number that everyone has a chance to contribute to the discussion. With this particular class it had nothing to do with resource constraints... maybe more to do with how many students were interested. I didn't have a single anthropology class after 101 that had more than 35 people in it (and this was at a large state school).

Both of your points are valid objections to MOOCs.

Not sure whether you are correct. If you are, I believe that MOOC model can be modified to fix them. (ex: local meetups for teaching how to learn, google hangouts for in-person discussions).

What is interesting is that your single paragraph contains more valid objections to MOOCs than the original 4500 word essay. It was a collection of anecdotes, emotional appeals. Which is really lame, considering that MOOCs are just getting off the ground, early alpha, there are tons of real serious flaws.

I heart the idea of MOOCs. I enjoyed my grad school. I've recently taken two online classes. Loved Ng's Machine Intelligence, dropped out of Startup Owner Manual (but got a few good pointers). When MOOCs take off, they will change education as much as self-driving car will change the car industry.

I'm a fan of MOOCs as well (haven't used that acronym before). Nobody should have to sit in a lecture hall with 300 other people trying not to fall asleep.

> There were two different perspectives (in journal articles) and you'd be assigned one to defend in the next class.

I always thought of these kinds of assignments as somewhat strange. You have to defend something you might not care about, not believe in or even be strongly opposed to.

I think that teaches you how to be politician. How to find arguments for the cause that is not yours for gains completely unrelated to the real validity or value of the cause. I felt we are being thought how to be dishonest and that it pays.

It teaches you how to recognize bias.

> I think this kind of thing is hard to replicate in digital settings.

I think we are a group of people discussing a topic in a digital forum right now.

Coursera, Udacity, and the others all have forums as well where there are extended discussions on various topics between students, TAs and faculty.

It's not the same thing. Thinking critically and speaking in front of a group of people is different than participating in a discussion online.

It's relatively rare activity for adults. Especially when compared to online discussion.

Are you sure future adults would benefit from being able to have in person discussion with group of people if there is almost no chance of them having such in their adult lives?

I don't know what you do, but I couldn't get through a day as a software engineer without those skills. That said, I'll give you credit for pointing out critical thinking as a rare activity for most adults. ; )

I'm web developer who works remotely.

I worked in corporation for some time where we had multi-person real live meetings but they were devoid of any real discussion or content.

I also worked in few start-ups where we discussed important things in person but I never talked to more than two people at the same time.

If you really have to discuss things that require critical thinking with a group of people daily I think you are fairly unique and I don't envy you. :-)

Daily, the group is no more than 3 or 4 other engineers and designers (and there's plenty of time to code w/ headphones on), but the core skill I'm talking about is being able to think critically on your feet. We pair code a lot, and I feel like that's one of the places where experience thinking out loud is helpful.

There are many problems with the current crop of MOOCs, I'll be the first to admit that. In their current state they are not an alternative.

That said, the argument advanced against them in this article and numerous times on this and other boards is elitist and out of touch. "These lectures do not compare to the ones I sat in at UC Berkeley/Stanford/MIT! people watching them are not getting a REAL education!" Not only is it a classic "no true Scotsman", it also neglects to note that increasingly all large courses at large state universities are adopting a model not unlike the MOOC model. Lectures are increasingly posted online, and coursework is now almost always a blackboard quiz. Projects are submitted online, no paper copies are ever even created. Office hours are available, true, but often they are with a TA who is only slightly more than a glorified Tutor. All of these are transparent time and money saving moves on the part of the departments and professors.

Students rarely object as online classes give them more flexibility to work (something rarely mentioned in these kind of articles). Everyone wins on one level and loses on another. The quality of education drops as a consequence, but we're talking second and third tier schools here so it doesn't exactly make the news. All things considered, I might as well be taking MOOC at this point. I personally prefer Coursera to blackboard. More variety and no nagging advisors telling me I don't have the prereq. The tools and ui are better too! And its free!

We live in a different world. Currently the most important things are the ability to get, filter and process information and not the ability to store it.

Most of the courses I have taken by coursera and edx were a blast. But I have experience and good math background.

We as a society should refocus the primary education on "rapid obtainable literacy" in any given topic. The student must be able to obtain the critical mass of knowledge that will help him to navigate on its own in the MOOC, and then we will be able to leverage the new educational startups.

There is no reason that you can't have a teacher lecture students over the internet or lead a discussion over the internet, using voice, voice and audio, or just chat. There is no reason why students can't do interactive labs with help from teachers online.

So I think that in most cases, there really doesn't have to be any qualitative difference between online and in person learning.

But there are lots of advantages, starting with the increased ability for students to work at their own pace. And for computer assisted learning, i.e. interactive learning activities on a computer, possibly graded automatically by a computer. Also the ability to communicate online can be a big advantage over having to physically walk to an office hours or library. And of course the obvious one is the ease of distributing electronic textbooks and other learning materials online. Or for example delivering a live or recorded lecture online to an audience of 10,000 students from all over the world rather than to an audience of 100 students at some expensive university.

This is just one of many areas were social institutions are lagging far behind technological progress. The arguments against using technology are not rationally motivated.

I regret wasting my time reading this long and rambling mess...

The author apparently didn't even bother to take a single MOOC class. Instead only acknowledging watching 9 minutes of a single 18 minute video (the class has 13 in total) for Kahn Acadamy's US History class. Strange considering we are talking about college and this Kahn class targets middle or high school students.

The author is also apparently unfamiliar with many of the basic features, such as discussion forums, or major advantages, such as timing flexibility (learn when you can for as long as you can) of MOOCs. Or that many of the students are not even in the US.

However there is a link to an interesting blog post previously posted to HN "Napster, Udacity, and the Academy" which makes the software is eating the world argument for education.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4773857

"Wouldn't it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?"

In good times investing in innovation is a luxury. In bad times it is a necessity. The returns on the present education model are not covering the costs in many cases.

When was education working and who was it working for?

As a means of social control, a method of inuring people to being ranked, judged and told what to do it works wonderfully[0]. It is not about learning or it would not start so early, at least not for teenagers[1], nor would there be so much homework[2]. Doing lots of work that you dislike because you have been told to do it is good training for the world of work for most though. Every large school system is lineally or organisationationally descended from one designed to produce good soldiers[3].

The school system works just fine for childcare, for socialising people to accept random authority figures telling them what to do and for reducing creativity. It does what it's meant to, even if no one who's in charge will acknowledge that's what it's function is.

[0] http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

[1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/sleepy-kids-learn-less...

[2] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/only-do-math-homework....

[3] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/schools-are-for-war.ht...

I agree with the substance of this. Passing on wisdom is not the first, second, or even 3rd point of "education" anymore. Its basically a state-sanctioned childcare/socialization programme. Its cleverly mandated under the legal authority for education, but one should make no mistake as to its purpose, and this is one of the many great trojan-horse examples of government-gone-wild in the name of "compassion". All those kids at failing inner-city schools are just being soul-destroyed for a life of minimum-subsistence-wage menial labour.

"I agree with the substance of this. Passing on wisdom is not the first, second, or even 3rd point of "education" anymore."

Emphasis added

At no point, ever, has there been a state education _system_ where passing on wisdom or knowledge was the first, second or third point.

All those kids at failing inner-city schools are just being soul-destroyed for a life of minimum-subsistence-wage menial labour.

Actually most of them don't end up working, and they sure as hell don't end living at a subsistence level. The bottom 5% of US income has a great standard of living by global standards. And any soul destroying that's going on is pretty much universal, not confined to members of the underclasses.

While I agree that we're still a far way from replacing the classic university model with online courses, I feel that pointing out the flaws of any individual lesson video is a limited and weak argument in this debate.

Not because it's wrong to point those flaws out. But because classic educational courses don't expose themselves to such transparency. I can think of a good number of classes I sat through that if they were put on YouTube for the convenience of critics to rewatch and nitpick, they would be as mock-worthy as the examples the OP uses

That's some pretty loaded language and interesting choice of quotes there...

can go in this list: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2873

I'm a top 10% student that goes to a top 30 engineering school. I haven't gone to a lecture or bought a textbook in over 2 years. My grades haven't suffered - they're mostly a function of time spent doing homework and going through the lecture slides.

For undergraduate students - a physical college is now mostly unnecessary (excluding some lab work). Research students - not so much.

Another thing. Arguments against any new technology saying "Oh, but you can't replace that!" are always going to die. Lowering the cost of something by a factor of 100x changes everything.

"Wouldn't it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?" Short answer: NO.

Agreed. That was a truly bizarre statement. People who continue to claim that our education problems will all be magically solved by throwing more money at the problem bewilder me unless they're the ones directly benefiting from that money, that is. Tuition rates have been rising out of control for decades, but education is a big problem right now. More money did not solve the problem.

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