This University Teaches You No Skills – Just a New Way to Think
wired.com
wired.com
That said, according to the article there is one interesting innovation here. While traditional liberal arts schools value critical thinking over tangible skills, students still pick a major and working on a major within an academic department usually means being prepared for graduate school in that discipline. Instead this school tasks its students with creating something novel within their concentration, which is potentially a great way to compromise between the lofty ideals of a liberal arts education and the non-existent job market for academics. Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia, you can learn to think and try to apply those critical thinking skills toward making a tangible impact on the world.
"Deep Springs is founded on three principles, commonly called the "three pillars": academics, labor, and self-government."
Any other tidbits?
My engineering and computer science classes taught me more about "how to think" than the liberal arts classes I took - those seemed to focus on regurgitating facts or the professor's viewpoint. And I certainly didn't get the impression that the in-major kids were doing anything different, just better practiced regurgitation.
I think if "liberal arts" education were fulfilling its promise, it would have long ago adopted programming (an unforgiving applied logic) as a core component (scheme/haskell, not python). People in general learn by example, while teachers (having already learned) tend to emphasize abstract models. This is a great recipe for model precession, fostering an illusion of thinking critically while being at the mercy of now-invisible built in assumptions.
I'm guessing your logic classes had similar problem solving where errors were objectively called out. I regrettably didn't take philosophy classes, but only softer things that were subjectively graded via essay. In retrospect, they seem like fine topics to have studied after one developed critical thinking skills, but when presented as competitors to hard logic they devolved into a subjective/memorization fest
(I'd love to upvote you for friendly insightful discussion, but I appear to be unable to vote on comments. email to hn@ has so far gone unanswered)
I.e. with engineering, reality is the check on the validity of your critical thinking. With liberal arts, there is no such check.
It's not hard to imagine going to a liberal arts college where the professors are all moderately to aggressively liberal and/or Democrat.
I'm not saying that it's RIGHT that this could happen, but that it's not unreasonable to expect that it COULD happen.
I don't know if that's because internet commenters in general just use the preceding comment as a springboard to jump onto their own soapbox, or if HN users are particularly bad at reading and responding to the content of a text (while loudly denouncing such worthless literary skills).
Is this really a good thing? There are certainly plenty of things in this world that are relative, unanswerable, or heuristics based on differing utility functions. But arguments about those things should still be logically right, based on differing assumptions that are made explicit.
Even then, there's the foggy feeling that remains, every thought exists in some context with some assumptions. You can continue to question what assumptions exist that you aren't aware of, and redefine your opinions through that vocabulary instead, and perhaps convince yourself into a point of view you would never consciously switch to given knowledge of the prior, through the trickery of time and language.
Trying to maintain a coherent view of the world assuming the possibility of relativism across all domains is insanity. Trying to function with that mass of unanswerables leading to possibly infinitely descending chains of undefined, fuzzy variables is like hitting a wall of meaningless symbols. It makes doing things in reality trivial. The task of coming to know what you explicitly, continuously define as unknowable is impossible.
In theory, logic is beautiful. But there's stuff that makes logic seem incomplete, when it comes to application. At the trail end of the thought, it still feels like thinking about everything all at once, while knowing nothing.
The entire world isn't engineering, and there are plenty of things that we have to agree to disagree on (we can come up with objective solutions that minimize the disagreement, but that only goes so far). Since softer subjects will always lack clear objective answers, we could hope for a change in liberal arts teaching that required creating independent rational arguments rather than getting by by restating the specific one the professor happens to believe in.
As opposed to, say, arguing about who is a better President - Obama or Bush? Liberal arts majors can argue that all day, and never be able to demonstrate a thing to be true.
Note that there have been many scientific theories that were debated persuasively, reasonably, and logically, until someone applied the scientific method and proved one side correct and the other false.
Consider:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
It doesn't even mention the scientific method!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
The revolution in the human condition has been brought about by application of the scientific method - it's the most useful critical thinking skill ever devised.
We don't need more critical thinkers we need constructive thinkers. People who add something new rather than learning what we already know.
You don't become good at critical thinking by studying critical thinking. The very problem with this approach is that you are in fact just learning a specific way of thinking and thus leaving out the critical part of it.
Furthermore in my experience many more technical people are actually great creative thinkers but not many liberal arts people are great technical thinkers.
Computer science varied depending on language - when it was Haskell the focus on thinking was a lot higher than when using Java or C, for me. The classes that used imperative languages tended to focus a lot more on nuts and bolts. Maybe that's just a preference of my uni though - they tended to teach algorithm classes etc in Haskell and database style classes in some imperative language, I think, so maybe the difference there is due to a choice from their side.
Organic chemistry, statistics, formal logic didnt evolve my thinking at all in my view.
I guess in short - the things that have developed my thinking the most are things that are about models and algorithms. You could probably run classes focusing on those, but Im not sure there is a big value in doing so compared to just teaching the subjects that are heavy in doing those tasks.
You had bad professors and/or were skating through. To a degree, you will get out what you put in.
Perhaps in STEM fields good work product often is more defined (e.g., the number either is right or wrong) and therefore more efficient for professors to evaluate than in, for example, a history class where you analyze the primary documentary sources for and the causes of the Meiji Restoration.
The difference between Minerva and this is that at Minerva, it seems like the focus is directly teaching those things, whereas at a liberal arts college you learn those things very indirectly and usually filtered through existing disciplines. My brother is a biochem major at a liberal arts college and all that means is that he has to do more presentations than he would have had he gone to the state research university I did.
This is actually a dramatic shift from teaching concepts like analytical thinking, organization, communication, etc., indirectly via things like classics, philosophy, and other mostly-obsolete and practically useless things that are used as signalling for high wealth (ability to take classes that don't relate to a profession) and conscientiousness (ability to read a lot and write about it).
That said, the "critical thinking" in liberal arts is a joke. What actually happens is that the professor presents several arguments for or against a topic, and you regurgitate this on a paper.
As for whether learning critical thinking in the liberal arts is a direct or indirect result, I like this quote from Reed College's dean of the faculty Peter Steinberger:
"There’s only one thing that I think I can do, only one thing I’m qualified to do, and that’s help students learn how to think, to analyze, to develop intellectual discipline, to acquire a degree of mastery over one or another conceptual apparatus that helps us organize experience in compelling and defensible ways." [1]
He is not alone among teachers of the liberal arts in believing that while they are compelled by their individual disciplines, they are ultimately teaching students to think.
1. http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/sallyportal/posts/2014/an-...
I don't disagree that liberal arts colleges say the things you claim, I just dispute that they do them. One is much harder than the other.
> Instead of "learning to think" and being prepared for a fictional career in academia
This is overstated. I expect that the great majority of high-paying jobs are held by people with liberal arts degrees. The idea that they are worthless in the job market is a popular exaggeration, but wrong.
> part of liberal arts education, especially at the most liberal artsy institutions (University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Reed, etc) is specifically training you the tools of an academic discipline
Having no expertise in this area myself ... I agree that learning how to be a professional academic is not widely valuable. However,
I suspect there is value in focusing on an academic discipline. The thinking required for academic disciplines -- especially in regard to creating new knowledge -- may differ from more practical ones, and learning something in depth differs from learning in more superficial breadth.
It may not matter so much what you learn, as long as you study something in depth.
Finally, it may prepare you well for graduate school, which is much more common than academic careers.
He's right. That is insane. But so is spending $27,950/year for 5+ years to "be taught how to think." Coupled with their absurd acceptance rate, I've gotta agree with the other comments that point out that they simply recruited brilliant kids who were already independent thinkers.
Reminds me of a Department of Labor(?) study that concludes that ~80% of people can do a job if you tell them what to do, show them how to do it, and manage their progress, ~15% of people are able to do a job if you tell them what to do, and <5% of people are able to figure out what needs to be done and do it. Cool, Minerva, you might have some "success" by finding people who are already capable of doing what you say you do for them.
The "learning to code in Python" part qualifies you to earn in the ballpark of $125K USD per year, on average, over a career that will last ~42 years. ROI is 2 years (after graduation), capital will last literally for a lifetime. What's not to like?
The "quarter of a million dollars" part will give you the opportunity to know and make friends with people that can pay that kind of money out of pocket (not like you, middle class boy, who had to take a lot of debt for the privilege). Those friends will open doors to you and apply a multiplier factor to the baseline scenario ($125K per year). Best case, they will be your co-founders in a multi-million acquisition event. Worst case, you do not do any friends and coat-tail in the fame of your institution (with multiplier factor between 0.9 and 1.5)
Also your ROI assumes you have no expenses at all for those two years?
There is a lot not to like about being a quarter million dollars in debt at the age of 22. Especially since the majority of programmers who graduate from these colleges come out and make between 60-80 for years and many never reach 125,000. Especially when you consider trying to pay for rent, food, bills, loans, and living all at once.
And while the number of graduates who go on to have a multi-million dollar acquisition event is undoubtably higher than most professions, it is still a statistically insignificant percentage much like kids in college hoping to play football for the rest of their days.
Personally I'd take critical thinking skills over any specialized set of skills any day. Because those are the kind of skills that can improve all areas of my life, not just the financial aspect.
The fact that, as a society, we can routinely saddle 22 year olds with tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for the chance to get a higher education is deeply troubling to me.
[0] - http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/computer-programme...
You are also right about my model, my ROI is probably flawed. I think the main flaw, though, is not lack of "expenses" but lack of a cost of opportunity analysis which explores what happens if you go find yourself any job available after completing high school.
Still, I'd challenge the idea that $80K is the average salary we should care about. First, I am talking about lifelong average, not starting salary.
Second, since we are talking about a "quarter of million dollar education", I assumed it is an elite program we are talking about. This means their alumni will tend to get better results, in part because of the quality of the program itself... but also in (a big) part because of the enhanced opportunities available to their graduates.
Or maybe I am out of touch with the cost of a university degree in the US. If this is the cost for a typical program, then my point was indeed optimistic.
It's not a quarter of a million dollars, but it's still a house in many areas of the country, and a ton of money to pay off. And lets not forget the vast majority of majors do not have anywhere near the demand Computer Scientists enjoy.
It is an extremely short sighted course of action for our nation to not curb ever increasing tuition costs. The future is going to consist of a huge portion of our population either without a higher education due to the preventative and egregious costs of obtaining one; or struggling under a mountain load of debt which continually accrues interest, doesn't disappear with bankruptcy, and prevents those burdened as such from achieving stability through real estate purchases and retirement saving accruement. In my eyes, this will only result in losses on the world stage as our debt ridden and undereducated populace stops producing the types of environments which engender creativity and spur creation.
By necessity, you gain the later by long years of self study (and probably lots and lots of of detours and false starts).
When you put it that way, it's kinda funny: in any other context that would be an obvious scam.
Then Wired writes this: "...it’s highly exclusive, boasting a 2.8 percent acceptance rate, which is lower than even Harvard or Stanford."
It's entirely possible that Wired printed that line without Minerva's blessing and that Minerva's acceptance rate at the moment is simply a consequence of their very small trial class (which is a great idea, not trying to knock their approach).
I'd be really bummed to see Minerva changing their vision and trying to be more exclusive than inclusive. I'm just hoping it's a slip of the tongue on an editor's part and not a reflection of where Ben && company want to go with Minerva.
The market value of an elite education is the very fact that it's exclusive. That's why the connections are so valuable and the seal-of-approval means so much on the job market. And that payoff is what justifies the quarter-million-dollar (actually, closer to $140-180k) price tag.
This is not a comment in favor of, or against, Minerva. However, the truth is that our society doesn't really value critical thinking, education or culture. It values money and power and social access. That's why colleges can charge such high tuitions, it's why "disrupting" the current model is impossible, and it's why the quality of education you get, even if you go to Harvard, is good only if you're already self-motivated when you enter the place. (You can learn a lot at an elite school, but no one forces you to do so. That's equally true of non-elite schools.) I think ed-tech is doomed to underperform because most of these companies don't understand what's actually behind the problem. It's deep and sociological, and (to use someone else's phrase) the problem has its act together.
In that way, it should be possible to have an exclusive AND comparatively large program churning out top-tier students. Pessimism aside, you won't know if something like this will work in the market until you actually try it.
Don't really feel like tackling the bigger socio-economic issues you brought up, but I think we more or less disagree on "society's" value structure and what to make of it. I think a big change is in order, and I'm really hoping Minerva can be part of that change.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the clarification, and I hope you succeed with what you're trying to do.
http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi...
"Question: How do you convince investors that you can teach critical thinking skills? Answer: Screen for students that already have those skills."
Put the %2.8 acceptance rate in an interesting light.
Anyways I think this is interesting and valuable if for any reason that it's a new, and different idea and some lessons of value may stem from it.
What I liked the most was the 2 year "Go do something novel" task. I think the most valuable form of education comes from attempting to do something non-trivial and more focus on that is interesting.
May I wonder which world is this? You can't access information if you don't have the mental framework to process it. For example, where is the one click to get the information about the concept of Monad in Haskell?
The only way you could access to information in an structured way is the way in which University teach concepts. As another example there is not royal way to Maths, how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept.
Is a very big lie, and a great disservice to students to claim that there is one click to information. The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework to be able to get information by reading a good book and not by pressing the left button of your mouse.
"The real way to obtain information is to be helped with those that can give you some clues to construct the required mental framework"
"how are you going to get the one click to the concept of diffeomorphism if don't know about the hierarchical structure necessary to define that concept."
Um, you do further reading online or in a textbook until you understand the things you don't understand. Of course some ideas require context. Why do you believe people can't develop that mental context on their own?
However ignoring job skills won't get you a job. It'll be a hard sell to get their students hired, especially at any kind of specialty. There's just too long of a runway for many things - art, law, medicine, chemistry, engineering. What does that leave?
"He split us into groups to defend opposite propositions—that the cod had disappeared because of overfishing, or that other factors were to blame. No one needed to shuffle seats; Bonabeau just pushed a button, and the students in the other group vanished from my screen, leaving my three fellow debaters and me to plan, using a shared bulletin board on which we could record our ideas. Bonabeau bounced between the two groups to offer advice as we worked."
More like that at the link. So despite being online, it sounds like Minerva's trying to increase, not decrease, the amount of educator/student interaction involved.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-futu...
The article also reports, "Its students take all their classes online, and after their first year in California, they spend each semester in a new country of their choosing." This I call burying the lede. That's the really interesting and educational aspect of this program. If the students are funded to study abroad, moving from country to country as they go through the program, the program cannot help but be educational. Living in another country can't help but get a learner unstuck from the learner's earlier prejudices. "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."[4] What I learned from living overseas is that there are a lot of things people think that they just know from observation of the world that people with other cultural backgrounds do not assume to be true, and people from different cultural backgrounds often talk past one another until they examine their hidden "factual" assumptions about how the world works. Getting a group of learners to go all over the world while learning sounds like a very productive idea for a better education.
On the whole, it's good that the non-system of higher education in the United States allows experimentation like this. The people who are running the project aren't sure that they will produce graduates who end up getting jobs, but they will try something new and different while they have funding and see what happens.
[1] http://www.aft.org//sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thi...
[2] http://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/spring-2006/...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0078038367/
http://www.amazon.com/Folly-Fools-Logic-Deceit-Self-Deceptio...
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
[4] G. K. Chesterton, "The Riddle Of The Ivy" http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20697/
> Teaching students how to think is a fuzzy, amorphous idea. And so [they] crafted a [...] list of [...] "habits of mind and foundational concepts" that they want every student to learn in their first year. There are 129 of them.
I'd pay just to have that list. That list would be a huge source of constructive discussion around how to teach critical thinking skills.