Hacker News Reader

Comment by spartango | Hacker News Reader

>...who often advocates for a return to advanced research which couldn't happen without higher education.

I'm not quite so interested in the hypocrisy part, but as a Thiel fellow working on a pretty research heavy project (in biomedical tech), the academia + industry interplay is quite interesting.

For me, the fellowship has been anything but a way to abandon academia; indeed, my project depends heavily on collaborations I maintain with folks in the academic world, not to speak of my curiosity there. Thus, while the fellowship enables me to wear an industrial hat for the present, I see it as an interaction with a slightly different facet of academia. I've temporarily put down my classes to study the translational part of science, and hopefully help move it along.

So, for me the fellowship doesn't undermine the advanced research society needs, but enables it in another way.

View on HN

Ah, interesting. One thing that strikes me from reading biographies of people who lived in the past is how different the university system used to be. Of course, old universities were only for aristocratic men, but they also seemed to be a lot less industrialised than they are now.

Much more student/professor interaction (as opposed to now where a professor might lecture a classroom of a few hundred and leave all student interactions to a few overworked PhDs), more academic freedom and less need to cram for exams (even if the exams were tougher, people didn't need to beat the bell curve in the hope of a job at MckGoldmanDeloitte, freeing them to pursue knowledge for the sake of it if so inclined). I'm told Oxford and Cambridge still preserve some aspects of the old system, I don't know about other countries. The current system definitely slows down the smartest people unnecessarily, as the Thiel program has shown.

I imagine there are many more leverage points in the current education system that could enable similar improvements.

I think it's very easy to cast a blanket across all universities as being more "industrialized" and having less student-professor interaction, and I'm sure there's truth to that.

As a counter-anecdote, however--when I was at Harvard, I don't think I ever felt separated from professors. I spent a healthy amount of time interacting with professors from many disciplines, in the classroom, through research, and even casually. I found even the most respected professors accessible, and enjoyed discussions with them.

Harvard may be a special case; I'm not to judge other schools without experience. But I will say that I actually miss that climate a bit, rather than having tried to escape it.

Yeah, I think Harvard is definitely an outlier. Sounds a lot like Oxbridge. I studied at two very good, but still 'second-tier' universities (Warwick and HKUST) and it wasn't much like you describe (both those universities are known for being very over-populated, which might be a factor). At those kinds of places, maybe if you have the confidence and training to push yourself forwards, you could probably build interesting relationships with professors. Most 18-year-olds don't, though.

Median universities (in the UK, former polytechnics, in the US, community colleges) are even worse. Students there seem to be respected about as much as companies respect their minimum-wage employees. Very low tolerance for infractions (like late assignment submissions) that would be forgiven in higher-ranked places, for example. And I know some very smart people who studied at such places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com