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Surprising Things About School

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Re: Surprising Things About School

#171

Post by UncleEntity »

dpark wrote: post #166
UncleEntity wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a new thing (not the means testing but the idea behind it) AFAICT. It was just assumed that if your parents were above the "means" they would help out any way they could because that's what was expected of them as parents. College was also seen as an enabler and not an expectation for my generation. Or...if your parents spent all the college fund sending your sister to UCLA you could join the army and emerge…

Of course when college was a stretch but not median-income-barely-covers-tuition expensive, the assumption that parents would cover it were more reasonable. And it was less of an issue if they didn’t since the debt load wasn’t insane.

True enough...

I don't think my parents could've afforded to send my sister to Stanford back then which is roughly the equivalent to your average state school today (completely guessing here). They probably would've found a way though.

My point still stands though, means testing was intended to get the best and brightest into college even if they're poor, couldn't even imagine Reagan/Bush entertaining the idea of giving middle-class kids a free ride -- in fact I can even picture Reagan on the TV saying "Uncle Sam ain't your baby daddy!"

Re: Surprising Things About School

#172

Post by jgord »

austenallred wrote: post #57

OP here, also happen to be a YC founder (S17 - https://lambdaschool.com ). Shocked to see this on HN. A lot of people are asking me about number 7: > 7. 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. W…

I wonder if there is a model whereby you can have many investors donate small amounts in crypto and earn deferred interest on their investment.

Like how people purchase a mining contract for BitcoinCash .. except you get a delayed payout, and your investment directly helps educate people. Some sort of variant on Patreon.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#173

Post by white-flame »

artimaeis wrote: post #79

> "Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s" I understand the context the author is approaching this from - but it discounts the idea that MOOCs can be used the same way we use books. I've utilized about a dozen different MOOCs and I've _never_ completed a singl…

The biggest, most idiotic, and most frustrating problem IMO is that most MOOCs are inflexible in their schedule. This model is perfect for self-paced learning and very few serve that.

Plus, there are instructors and materials that aren't great, and are more useful for the basic introduction to concepts in the first few lessons, which can then enable self-learning that's more effective than the poorly taught meat & potatoes of the course.

(I've finished probably 3-4 MOOCs and didn't finish about the same amount.)

Re: Surprising Things About School

#175

Post by gymshoes »

tsumnia wrote: post #158
Chathamization wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is ultimately student preference. Sure. But the last time I checked, almost all MOOCs were lecture focused. Like I said, I've yet to find any with a text component as good as Dive Into Python or Learn C the Hard Way or other free online textbooks. Perhaps there's are a few out there, but every time I've browsed MOOCs I've found just about everyone to be lecture focused. Out of the dozens I've looked at (on mul…

(I will ask if you could define "community building" a little more. You did not in your original post, and it seems my assumption was incorrect. Before trying to address better, I'd like to have a more concrete definition) While I cannot speak for all MOOCS, I have not had the same experience. MIT's CS 6.00x course on EdX was work heavy, Udacity's Web Development course was work heavy, and even Coursera's Design of E…

I searched for The Design of Everyday Things but I could only find a course with this name on Udacity, not Coursera.

Can you check and confirm?

Re: Surprising Things About School

#176

Post by tsumnia »

gymshoes wrote: post #175
tsumnia wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I will ask if you could define "community building" a little more. You did not in your original post, and it seems my assumption was incorrect. Before trying to address better, I'd like to have a more concrete definition) While I cannot speak for all MOOCS, I have not had the same experience. MIT's CS 6.00x course on EdX was work heavy, Udacity's Web Development course was work heavy, and even Coursera's Design of E…

I searched for The Design of Everyday Things but I could only find a course with this name on Udacity, not Coursera. Can you check and confirm?

Ah, it was Udacity, not Coursera; my apologies

Re: Surprising Things About School

#177

Post by bzbarsky »

dpark wrote: post #152
lambda_lover wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same experience here -- my mother got a bachelor's right before my brothers and I went to college, which just ended up penalizing us because it looked like we should have a lot more savings than we really had. I think there's a very very small portion of the population who gets their tuition reduced enough to be comfortable. Loans end up covering the rest, so yeah, your average student really does pay clo…

The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults .

Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income. There are various ways of doing that, of course, with their own sets of problems.

Note that the UK does exactly this, last I checked.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#178

Post by dragonwriter »

bzbarsky wrote: post #177
dpark wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that we want "means testing" for tuition but almost no students have significant "means". So you either make (at least public) universities free, or you make the rather strange assumption that a bunch of adults will be handed tens of thousands of dollars from their parents. In pretty much no other case do determine social program eligibility of an adult by means testing different adults .

Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income. There are various ways of doing that, of course, with their own sets of problems. Note that the UK does exactly this, last I checked.

> Or we could do loans with repayment based on post-education income

The US already does this for federal loans, though it's not the default option, and the servicer (Navient) has been accused of actively steering borrowers away from the option, because it hurts the value of the loan-backed securities that Navient sells.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#179

Post by golergka »

edraferi wrote: post #40
golergka wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece o…

You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand. Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.

I would gladly invest time into some graduate course, but they require undegrad degree - and getting an undergrad CS degree after programming my whole life, studying a lot of theory and making personal hobby projects in almost every field (from OS to db to compilers to 3d renderers to ML) seems like a total waste.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#180

Post by carlmr »

fwdpropaganda wrote: post #109
carlmr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I said though. I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. I don't regret having studied, I saw a lot of cool stuff. But it's a very long time investment which doesn't lead to an equal ROI in terms of work output if you ask me. It leads to a good ROI mostly in terms of employment offers and salaries, because it has signaling value.

> I learned many interesting things, but most of them aren't directly of value to work. What did you study, and what do you do for work?

Electrical and computer engineering, and I'm working on embedded systems software in engine control units.
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