Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

fredrikdeboer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 185 posts

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#101

Post by nine_k »

oDot wrote: post #64
gnaritas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not wrong to worry about that, it's a rough world out there and getting a good job is vastly more important to most people than "human development". Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own. Only the rich have the luxury of being concerned about something other than a job.

They are wrong to worry about that. The world is dynamic, and human development, the way I interpret it, will help the students deal with the world they go out to. Better people will deal with what comes their way. Maybe today it's a job, but tomorrow it'll be something else. Students who were only thought how to build software, will have a hard time dealing with life when robots starts building software instead of t…

If "being better" means better communication, better critical thinking, better learning skills, better time management skills, better understanding of oneself — yes, please! These are the universal skills important most everywhere.

These are also skills that are hard to teach as a specific subject; they mostly come with experience in some other, more practical subject. Some of these, like critical thinking, can go against the modern prevailing religion (political correctness), which makes teaching them harder still.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#102

Post by oldandtired »

jamescostian wrote: post #71
jstewartmobile wrote: post #52

Parents, teachers, and students are so focused on "education" as a pedigree and job pipeline that if they don't see an immediate connection between a topic and a paycheck they're like "Who cares?! Why are you wasting my kid's time on that?" When the whole thing is an exercise in competitive pedigreeing, of course it's going to be gamed. If it were more about human development, we'd be focusing on the deltas instead,…

As a student, I agree with many of the words you said but for different reasons. I've had a middle school teacher who told us about her own sex life during class. I've had a high school teacher who droned on and on about her divorce (to the point that everyone learned so little, almost no one passed the AP exams she was supposed to prepare us for) and put down religions - again, during class. College isn't a whole lo…

Having been a student with good and bad teachers, I can see your point.

However, many of the things that you are being taught (at least I hope this is still the case) that don't appear to be needed for the "job" are actually important because they are needed for the understanding of the background for why and how the "job". The failure of teachers that we faced as students was that the reasons for learning something were often not explained and only became obvious when learning about other subjects in later years. Having the relevance of the knowledge explained to us would have made it easier for us to learn.

One of my favourite examples was the subject of Karnaugh maps (or K-maps) which is used in logic circuit minimisation for small circuits. We learned all about and didn't use it again for the rest of my engineering undergraduate days.

However, a number of years working with a colleague on trying to solve a particularly pernicious software problem, I asked him why he hadn't used the concept of "don't cares" in short-circuiting the logic mess that was required to solve the software dilemma we were facing. He had never heard of the concept as he had never been taught about K-maps in his undergraduate programming course.

One he understood the concept and it didn't take him long, he was able to write 5 lines that solved the problem, instead of the hundred's that he had already had written (with many more to follow) to test for the problem throughout the program.

I have been surprised at how often over the years, where theoretical knowledge or other knowledge has come to the rescue in finding a solution for specific real-world problems, even though it has (on the surface) no relevance to the job at hand.

I have worked with some very smart people over the years (much smarter than me) who have been stuck for a solution because they didn't have that "irrelevant" piece of knowledge from their undergraduate days, but I did and so a problem was solved.

The one piece of advice I will give you is to learn as widely as you can so that you basic knowledge base will be broad enough for you to keep adding to as the years go by.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#103

Post by calebl »

Loved this article. It presents a compelling case that most colleges are providing near-equivalent education, and that the variance is mostly in selection bias. My only objection: at the end, the author takes issue with the fact that it's nearly impossible to get people to take selection bias into account when choosing where to send their kids. However, there's another possible factor that I think parents might be considering: the network of connections that I build when I go to school X. Even if Harvard gives my daughter the same educational quality that, say, Florida State gives her... if she's likely to form a network of friends that are all approximately 100x higher in net worth, then if I care about her long-term economic outcomes, I'd still try hard to send her to Harvard, no?

I'm not saying that's ideal, and it's most certainly an outcome of the exact selection bias you're talking about... just that it's a semi-rational choice for the parents, because school choices can often be about non-educational effects.

Just my two cents, though... I could be way off. And regardless, thanks for the article.. definitely made me think about the topic more than I had.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#104

Post by lifeisstillgood »

""" You believe that making your state’s high school graduates more competitive in college admissions is a key aspect of improving the economy of the state. """

Well there's your problem. The link between educational attainment of a country and productivity is weak at best. (Switzerland being a good example of low university attendance and outrageously good economy)

Ha Joon Chang was quite persuasive on this - and suggests that the imaginary governor of the article should look to fix his states economy with focusing on improving the eco system of the economy - longer term more patient capital, regulatory regiemes that force longer term investment and behaviour, picking winners and protecting nascent growth industries. All the bad things.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#105

Post by 3131s »

limeblack wrote: post #50
bluGill wrote: post #7

Sending a troubled kid to a great private school probably will cause the kid to do better: because all the other students are doing well the bad students peers are working hard so the bad student sees that example and is likely to succumb to peer pressure and do better. For this to work the troubled kid needs to be kept out of the gangs and whatever else outside of school will lead to bad examples. However selection…

I went to five high schools growing up and this is not what I experienced. I personally and through others found the exact opposite to be true. Yes you can send students(whether bad or good) to both bad both public and private schools but sending bad students to good public or private schools doesn't make them a good student.

I also doubt that it's meaningfully true. I think the troubled kid would do better in a private school because there are better resources available, and the teachers would not be overburdened with large class sizes filled with similarly troubled students like in a public school.

I worked as a reading tutor at an elementary school for a year in the US. It was a terrible, terrible job because of how strictly prescribed the methodology was. We tested every kid in the school, and the test was to time the students for a minute and count how many words of a text they could read (an incredibly dumb metric). We did this twice a year and then tutored the kids that were at a slightly below average reading level, meaning that I was not even seeing the particularly troubled / low-performing kids. I had about 25 students that year and got to know a lot of them. Some of the kids didn't need my help at all, they were extremely smart but had read slowly and carefully on the test and so ended up embarrassed by having to be pulled out of regular class.

But the kids that were actually struggling to read at grade level almost all had bad situations at home. There was a boy who had to move in with his aunt mid-year because someone shot up their house while looking for the kid's older brother, a girl who had four other siblings and was frequently hungry because of her father's gambling and drinking, a kid who changed schools because his father was arrested for beating the kid's little sister, a recent immigrant girl who had 15+ siblings and step siblings that her mother somehow ended up taking care of, a very strange boy with a morbidly obese mother and no father, and probably some more I'm forgetting about. My co-worker had a student whose parents were both serving life sentences for murder. This was not even in a particularly rough city or a particularly rough school (the school is maybe 60% Hmong, so many of the kids needed ESL much more than "how many words can you read in a minute?"). The point being, if you don't change home situations like that then there's not much hope for a student's education at either a public or private school.

I won't even go into the daily prescribed routine of exactly how I was supposed to tutor the kids, and the constant evaluations to make sure I was, for example, counting down the timer with the correct fingers and correct hand. That seriously is / was an official Reading Corps policy and it was among many other inane policies in a broader system that was also deeply misguided.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#106

Post by fragsworth »

calebl wrote: post #103

Loved this article. It presents a compelling case that most colleges are providing near-equivalent education , and that the variance is mostly in selection bias. My only objection: at the end, the author takes issue with the fact that it's nearly impossible to get people to take selection bias into account when choosing where to send their kids. However, there's another possible factor that I think parents might be c…

I think the network is overrated. Everyone I've known has had the same experience - immediately after graduating, everyone gets a job, moves far away from one another, and slowly drifts apart from the friends they met in college.

You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#107

Post by sabujp »

terrahutte wrote: post #72

My school has a large Chinese international student body. The school is marketed as being diverse, but really those students are from wealthy families and can easily afford the 40k+ tuition. In the end, the campus isn't diverse, it is segregated. But at least the uni has more money for research.

majority of that mooney doesn't go to research, it goes to admin

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#108

Post by taneq »

fragsworth wrote: post #106
calebl wrote: post #103

Loved this article. It presents a compelling case that most colleges are providing near-equivalent education , and that the variance is mostly in selection bias. My only objection: at the end, the author takes issue with the fact that it's nearly impossible to get people to take selection bias into account when choosing where to send their kids. However, there's another possible factor that I think parents might be c…

I think the network is overrated. Everyone I've known has had the same experience - immediately after graduating, everyone gets a job, moves far away from one another, and slowly drifts apart from the friends they met in college. You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

To give an opposing anecdote, I've landed more than half of my full time permanent positions through personal recommendations or references from people I know from university. And these jobs have by far been more interesting and/or better for my career than ones I found through recruiters or vacancy ads.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#109

Post by superquest »

fragsworth wrote: post #106
calebl wrote: post #103

Loved this article. It presents a compelling case that most colleges are providing near-equivalent education , and that the variance is mostly in selection bias. My only objection: at the end, the author takes issue with the fact that it's nearly impossible to get people to take selection bias into account when choosing where to send their kids. However, there's another possible factor that I think parents might be c…

I think the network is overrated. Everyone I've known has had the same experience - immediately after graduating, everyone gets a job, moves far away from one another, and slowly drifts apart from the friends they met in college. You'll get a similar network working at your first job. And then your second job. The group you met in college is of little consequence in the end.

One's choice of first job is of great consequence, however, and it is greatly influenced by social group.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#110

Post by adrianN »

banach wrote: post #65
gnaritas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not wrong to worry about that, it's a rough world out there and getting a good job is vastly more important to most people than "human development". Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own. Only the rich have the luxury of being concerned about something other than a job.

On the contrary. The less you have, the more you stand to benefit from appreciating other things than possessions.

at least you can ponder the mysteries of existence while working your two mcjobs to pay rent.
Post reply on HN