Enstitute, an Alternative to College for a Digital Elite | Hacker News Reader

Enstitute, an Alternative to College for a Digital Elite

nytimes.com

50 pointsjfc16 comments

You certainly want to market this as being for a "digital elite", at least for the time being. And its best for technology professionals to maintain that type of attitude as long as possible where the belief is that these types of jobs require very rare intelligence and skillsets.

But I think that the realities of the situation are going to eventually change the cultural attitudes towards high tech workers. For the vast majority of high tech jobs, vocational training is not only much more economical, but also vastly more effective. (I would even go so far as to say that vocational training/apprenticeship activities are more effective at teaching more conceptual and abstract concepts that one might consider to be part of a traditional academic program, but thats not my main point.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocational_education

There's no question that vocational training is more effective for a "job." But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50 years? And what are the options for un-degreed vocationally-trained people in their 30s or 40s who realize that the track they chose at 18 was the wrong choice for them?

I don't know what the answers are. But let's at least ask the right questions.

(I realize that Germany and some other European countries do an excellent job of vocational training.)

>>But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50 years?

Not only that, but is vocational training adequate to create citizens equipped with the skills and knowledge to make them capable of analyzing the policy decisions voters in a modern democracy must consider? Some people will claim the traditional college system has failed in this regard, but they are confusing failure with lack of perfection. I'm sure not every citizen needs to go to college to have these skills, but I think most do, and this is especially important in regressive regions of the country.

Exactly what I was thinking. For a digital elite, it seems this new wave of avoiding college will be breeding increasingly narrow and specialist elites, shallow but for one deep focus. The statement in the article about "learning critical reasoning by thinking about product features" sounded like a joke, and frankly, the companies getting this smart, cheap labor [sic] seem to be the most to benefit, not the careers of these youths nor society as a whole. What it does to stifle creativity and innovation (where social-local-deals is exactly a symptom of stifled creativity) in the long term remains to be seen, because at least for me my biggest breakthroughs have come from being in contact with wildly different disciplines.

I think the lack of breadth of knowledge and skills in vocational training is a good counterpoint.

That is probably one of the biggest problems with skipping the traditional college track.

Maybe there is a middle ground that would provide a useful general education at a reasonable price as well as practical up-to-date training with leading edge skillsets and knowledge.

Maybe one way to improve education would be to start by incorporating more individualized (probably largely computer-assisted) instruction starting with young children, so that people could advance both their broader as well as more specialized skills and knowledge at their own pace. That would help many who are held back at times by group instruction as well as people who need to slow down for certain subjects.

Maybe there is also room to tune curriculum to provide less depth in certain areas that aren't related to one's chosen specialty. For example, I only completed about two years of college, but I remember getting through what seemed to be quite an enormous amount of chemistry knowledge and exercises. I feel that I may not have understood some of the fundamentals quite as well as I wished and that I went into much more depth in some areas of chemistry than was necessary. I also think that I spent too much time memorizing facts and practicing techniques because the field and curriculum hadn't fully incorporated modern computer tools.

Another idea for changing educational institutions: institutionalize life-long learning. I feel that even though things change on the leading edge of science and technology so quickly that vocational training and apprenticeships are much more effective and realistic approaches to gaining the most practical skills and knowledge, there is so much information available in so many fields, and new information being generated every day, that it makes no sense for an education to be "completed" at any set point. And now that we have so many internet-based tools for education and communication there is no reason for it to stop when people leave the campus.

Technically, this is what high school is supposed to do. That's why the government is willing to pay for it.

If it's not doing that, we probably need more of it. Maybe move all the "general liberal-arts undergrad education" into just being grades 13-16?

If it's not doing that, we probably need more of it.

One must be careful with this type of reasoning. It leads to all kinds of madness. I'll leave coming up with examples as an exercise for the reader; there are too many to list.

Edit: I will give one example: a homeowner is disappointed that the lawn he or she fertilizes once a month is turning brown and growing poorly. Fertilizer is supposed to make plants grow, right? So if the plants aren't growing, add more? Now, after being fertilized once per week, the lawn dies.

This is one of those cases where I started with a disclaimer, and then removed it to make my statement more pithy, because of course it doesn't apply in general--so the Principle of Charity should tell you I'm working from the facts of the specific case, instead of making an inference from a (misguided) universal. :)

Specifically, my original statement was going to be:

> If high school isn't accomplishing its goals (of giving citizens the tools to participate in democracy) -- and we see the need to supplement that education with years of additional university education to achieve the originally-intended effect -- then we probably just need to make those years of university education part of high school, mandatory, and free.

I don't think the "general liberal-arts undergrad education" is as effective if students still live at home. Living in very new environment helps students be more open to new ideas. I think this especially true where the students home environment is anti-science or bigoted.

Vocational training costs less than 0.25 of college costs. So you can get retrained every 10 years in a new skill.

First problem: doesn't scale. This whole "college is obsolete" meme falls flat when we start to talk about scaling. Not everyone who's in college belongs there, but for at least 200-500 thousand people each year, it's the best thing for them. How are you going to scale up the Thiel Fellowship or "be Hilary Mason's protegee" to the number of people attending college?

Also, tuition is going up because admissions (at top universities) are becoming an insoluble problem. They're now (by their own admission) turning away 3-5 fully qualified applicants for every acceptance. There really is no good way to sort through the applications at this point; you pick away the obvious "yes" (1%) pile and the unqualified 25% or so, and then it's guesswork over the remaining 74. Tuition is just part of the selection process. It's horrible that many people, through no fault of their own, can't compete; but there it is. It's not that colleges are evil or "greedy" more than anyone else. It's just that they can charge ridiculous prices without a measurable decline in academic quality (because 17-year-olds just aren't that different, no matter what they're told). Not by intention, they ended up running a protection racket over the entire middle-class job market.

As much as these gold-plated apprenticeship programs might be a good idea-- I like the concept of getting people in the real world before they're 22-- I see them as political disasters, especially given how fucked the people born 1985-1992 have been. At some point, the 19-year-old protegee becomes a 20-year-old employee. How, exactly, is one going to make that work? If the Benefactor (e.g. Mason, not to pick on her but because the OP mentioned her) continues the relationship then (a) s/he's going to get overextended after a few years of that, and (b) the team will be sabotaged by resentful people who didn't get the "CxO's protege" track. If the Benefactor doesn't continue the relationship, then the jilted protege fails in the same way that jilted proteges always go down. Either they melt down (upset that the favoritism doesn't continue and they become "just another employee") or they are torn down in their time of weakness.

I'm glad I had a liberal arts, general education because there is so much instability in the world. College is expensive and inefficient, but I don't see a solution to that problem here. Sure, it might seem like a good move for an individual to drop college for a "CTO protege" program, but careers are long...

Here's the other thing: the college is obsolete folks are targeting the wrong people. Thiel encourages smart kids not to go to college, then asks why we have twitter rather than flying cars. But we've yet to devise an alternative to the educational military industrial complex for capital intensive innovation (flying cars). Elon Musk isn't hiring a bunch of people without college educations to work at Tesla or Space X. Thiel fellows aren't going to perfect nuclear fusion or carbon capture.

The people who shouldn't be going to college are the non elite. We need Thiel fellowships for people who would be going to Perimeter State, not Stanford.

Taylor Wilson might disagree with you... :)

(disclaimer: i'm a thiel fellow)

Taylor Wilson is obviously brilliant, but he's about a million times more likely to have a lasting impact on nuclear science staying in university and leveraging institutional resources and knowledge than he is going it alone. The $100k you get from a Thiel fellowship is basically pocket change. Maybe he can do something with it, but he could do more faster if he had real resources, like a DOE contract.

I sometimes wish I had a liberal arts education and just fucked around programming and hacking in my spare time. A lot of tech education is dominated by old tenured people focused in narrow domains that haven't the slightest clue about the large-scale changes and trends that startup culture is attuned to. Anyway, this guy agrees with you: http://www.forbes.com/sites/vivekranadive/2012/11/13/a-liber...

Good points. Not 100% sold on scaling being a problem. The master-apprentice relationship scales for a lot of industries and has for hundreds of years. Also, I didn’t get the perception from this article that they’re trying to replace university education altogether. This could be a great way to get into startups, advertising and some other industries universities haven’t managed to create coherent lines of study for. [My background: dropped out of university, worked for digital agencies, now at a startup creating a mobile game platform]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com