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Surprising Things About School

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Re: Surprising Things About School

#21

Post by jackgolding »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I kno…

I started writing a comment to share my similar story of a blue-collar upbringing, but realised that other than a few chance encounters most of the relevant mentorship I have gotten was as a professional or read in articles/books. The best things I've learned in life through tough lessons - the trick is don't fail too hard.

The important stuff I learned before graduating my bachelors was things like:

1) It's better to be a small fish in the big pond (my career councillor told me this when I was 16, I think I disagreed with it in my first 3 years of uni but now I can totally agree.)

2) You don't owe anyone anything and you aren't tied to anyplace on earth (Mum - grew up moving a lot so when I had an opportunity to attend a more prestigious university my mum gave me a lot of support)

3) Always swap jobs every few years (my uncle worked for the same company for 18 years before being laid off - he has done well but nearly everyone he started working with are execs now)

Most related to your comment is something I was told a few years after university where I was pushing work to fast track my professional development as much as possible. A senior manager told me there is only so much other people can teach you, in the end you need to do the time and build the experience.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#22

Post by pjc50 »

randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

> (after all, someone has to do it)

Until it gets automated.

I think you're over-assuming that people's "achievement level" is a completely general, fixed number, when there are a lot of suggestions that it's more situational.

There is some suggestion that the supply of graduates isn't well matched to job market needs, which usually manifests in people being opposed to anything that isn't STEM. But that's not the same thing as an argument about achievement.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#23

Post by zaarn »

randomdata wrote: post #20
watwut wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MOOCs were propagated as alternative to traditional higher education. Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. I remember reading those optimistic articles. At that it failed. It is not cheaper education for non traditional non full time student with lack of money. They drop out faster or equally…

> Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your entire life to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical…

>The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life.

I would rather say it's because neuroplasticity is high until you're still relatively young. In later years it takes more effort to learn and retain.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#24

Post by austenallred »

VLM wrote: post #16

The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't kn…

OP here (shocked to see this on HN):

The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them.

In other words, take a random sample of 100 people with the same level of motivation. 90% will complete a live, guided course. 5% will complete a MOOC of the same quality. Which is unfortunate because the live/synchronous part is what is expensive.

There was a time when we thought all education was is just a bunch of video lectures, and that if we got a bunch of professors to record their lectures college would be free.

We now know that doesn’t work, at least for the vast, vast majority of people, both because we’re unable to discipline ourselves and because most true learning happens in a multi-way environment with accountability measures.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#25

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education.

The whole point of OP is that education does not correlate with achievement, because there are any number of showstopper issues - mostly lack of up-front cash, and/or debt, often in really quite small amounts - that keep talented people from achieving a much more productive and rewarding life.

The bigger issue is that social class determines "achievement" far more than either education or talent do. And this is incredibly toxic and destructive, especially over the longer term, because it creates a poverty economy where the entire economy runs at some small fraction of its true potential.

The fact that a few people are super-rich doesn't alter this. It's about the opportunity cost of not recognising, nurturing, and rewarding talent and ability on an industrial scale - while using narratives like yours to pretend that the problem is individual personal failure, and not systemic economic self-harm.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#26

Post by randomdata »

zaarn wrote: post #23
randomdata wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. It seems premature to say that it isn't provided that. You have your entire life to gain a college-level education. The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical…

>The primary reason that brick and mortar schooling is provided up front, in a relatively short span of time, is because it is impractical to visit that brick and mortar school on a regular basis throughout your entire life. I would rather say it's because neuroplasticity is high until you're still relatively young. In later years it takes more effort to learn and retain.

17% of college students are already over the age of 35 and that number is growing[1]. This does not seem to be any kind of real impediment.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/back-school-o...

Re: Surprising Things About School

#27

Post by Turing_Machine »

watwut wrote: post #17
randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

MOOCs were propagated as alternative to traditional higher education. Not just something educated people use to add to their education, but something an uneducated person with high school diploma can use to get equivalent of college. I remember reading those optimistic articles. At that it failed. It is not cheaper education for non traditional non full time student with lack of money. They drop out faster or equally…

> They drop out faster or equally fast then non traditional students on colleges (who drop out a a lot too).

However, they don't drop out owing tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. That in itself would seem to be a major advantage.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#28

Post by randomdata »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #25
randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education. The whole point of OP is that education does not correlate with achievement, because there are any number of showstopper issues - mostly lack of up-front cash, and/or debt, often in really quite small amounts - that keep talented people from achieving a much more productive and rewarding life. The bigger issue is that social cla…

> Incomes have remained stagnant because of productivity capture, not because of education.

Not because of education. The education is simply irrelevant and has no bearing on income. The market doesn't value that output. Nobody goes to the grocery store and pays more for produce that is certified as grown by university educated farmers. Why would they?

Re: Surprising Things About School

#29

Post by michaelbuckbee »

icebraining wrote: post #10
triplesec wrote: post #3

Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.

You're describing one of the other points he makes in this: as bad as you think for profit education is, it's worse.

Austen has been railing against places like University of Phoenix, etc for a while as what's been discovered about them is just nuts. The stat that stood out for me was that at one point they had a substantial number of recruiters (thousands) but exactly zero job placement staff.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#30

Post by kthejoker2 »

icebraining wrote: post #10
triplesec wrote: post #3

Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.

The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds.

That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.

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