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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

theatlantic.com

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Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#321

Post by bachmeier »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #312
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

> What you're describing is basically a new textbook.

Yep. I'm reminded of the MOOCs. The idea was to remove all elements from the class that had a cost (i.e., no office hours, no questions during the lectures). MOOCs turned out to be a better textbook, not a better class.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#322

Post by guitarbill »

uzakov wrote: post #287
chrisseaton wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there something I'm missing? Yes you're missing something. My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities. And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite un…

> In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. When I applied to university a while ago the rule was that you can apply to 5 universities only, ie make 5 applications in total. Only exception was "clearing" but thats a different story

UCAS only allows you to pick either Oxford or Cambridge as part of those 5 if I'm remembering correctly.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#323

Post by mindvirus »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #312
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

Absolutely agree, the physical presence is extremely important. So much of what I learned was from having inspiring peers, professors and TAs in undergrad.

With that said though, imagine if the baseline for every class in every university was "great classes with awesome course material". Now the differentiating factor becomes what you talked about - the quality of the TAs, the professors and their research, your classmates. Wouldn't that be an improvement?

I'm thinking of it as us automating away the non-creative part of school - i.e. as you noted, the valuable stuff is the interactions and the peers, so why not maximize the focus on creating opportunities for that?

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#324

Post by bena »

There are things that can increase the chances of "a good life". There is nothing that can guarantee it. Pocket aces increase your chance of winning a hand, but it doesn't guarantee you win.

So while a college degree is not a guarantee, the question is whether or not it increases your chances. Because if it does, you can combine it with other things that also increase your chances to give yourself the best shot.

I mean, it is possible to sit infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters and get Shakespeare. Doesn't mean it's a good strategy.

Now, if college is unavailable to someone for whatever reason, it is good to know that a good life isn't dependent on getting a college degree. You can focus harder on other positive indicators.

But if we're going to dismiss everything that isn't a sure thing, we're going to be just dismissing everything.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#325

Post by mcguire »

omginternets wrote: post #30

I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments): - "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees. - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who g…

"- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England)."

From what I've seen over the last decade, this is incredibly true in the United States, particularly with the rise of for-profit schools offering online degrees.

("Oh, and X has a Ph.D."

"Oh? Where from?"

"I think it's the University of Phoenix."

"Ok.")

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#326

Post by 908B64B197 »

omginternets wrote: post #30

I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments): - "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees. - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who g…

> it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).

Tuition in France is basically free from what I understood. Even if students over-evaluate the value of the school, the fact that it's free still makes it attractive. And I think that some universities are teaching only (no research) no?

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#327

Post by bananaface »

elindbe2 wrote: post #57
mac01021 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is "what is Y in this case"?

A job at Google? I've seen plenty of videos and articles with titles like: "Ex-googler explains the meaning of life".

Techlead isn't serious

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#328

Post by mindvirus »

robotresearcher wrote: post #309
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

Imagine we collected the best material in written, bound volumes. And nearly every city had a large collection you could borrow from for free. We did. The professors of history, psychology, art, biology, math, - everything - at the world's greatest universities very often write down what they know in books. We achieved this already. You can read Feynman's course on physics tonight. Your city library probably has it.

Absolutely, and that's something I'm very grateful for! One of the things I love the most about where I live is the excellent library system, and I have taken a ton of advantage of it. That said, it's not always the best for serious self study, since often books lack answer keys or worked solutions.

I'm not proposing distance ed. I'm proposing that we shape education around automating the rote things, in particular delivering lectures. I don't think the main benefit of being on campus is the lectures or coming up with assignments, instead (as another comment noted) it's the peers and the people you interact with and how they help you learn. And so by automating away the rote part of it and focusing on the creative (research, TAing, peer interaction), it seems like we should be able to create better outcomes.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#329

Post by marcusverus »

dumbfoundded wrote: post #312
mindvirus wrote: post #289

There's so much potential in a better university/college. Imagine that in society we pooled our resources to make the best video/online courses for a variety of subjects. The best CS courses. The best history courses. The best biology courses. We could focus on making the courses accessible and translated. We could make the best assignments and projects, iterated and experimented on with a population of millions. Hec…

I think the real value of a university is the community. What you're describing is basically a new textbook. It doesn't replace the people you interact with. Going to a great college doesn't mean great classes with awesome course material. It's other classmates you study with, it's the TAs that hold office hours, the professors too, sometimes.

There's no reason that this couldn't work via an online community. Online courses don't do anything to foster this kind of connection, because they have always been a lazy facsimile of the in-person college course experience. If they tried, online courses could easily foster these kinds of relationships and unlock a ton of potential.

I also think that this is a larger societal problem that should be but has not been addressed by social networking apps. There are no social networks that are designed to foster communication about highly specific ideas. Sure I can go to r/history to find people who are generally interested in history, but where can I go to find people who would be interested in book-clubbing G.J. Meyer's 'A World Undone'? If I want to talk about physics in general, I could go to /r/physics. But how do I find physicists who want to discuss matter-antimatter asymmetry? You can glom on to conversations in current social networks, but there is no way to start/find/subscribe to discussions about very specific subject matter.

Point being, rather than saying that the IRL personal interactions at college are a reason why the current model is ideal, we could do a lot of good by figuring out how to port that experience A) onto online courses, and B) onto the world at large.

Re: A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life

#330

Post by mcguire »

iguy wrote: post #270
throwaway894345 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like we should make the debt conditional on the degree pursued. How much you’re allowed to take out in federal loans ought to be a function of the pay associated with that degree. I’m sure it’s not a perfect system, but it seems a lot better than the status quo or solutions that involve burdening society with the economic liability of a glut of (economically) low-value degrees.

My suggestion to achieve this is to cap repayments (of non-dischargable loans), perhaps at 15% of taxable income, and written off 20 years after signing. That would make lenders very interested in the outcomes of various courses. And their offers to prospective students would convey useful career advice, too.

Note that the average (mean, I assume) student loan payment is $393, according to the article. The median student loan payment is $222 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student...).

$393 is 15% of $2620 which annualizes to $31,512, which is about the median personal income for full-time workers (whoops, before taxes). ($222 is 15% of $17,760 annual, about the poverty line for two.) That's not a wildly big change over the current state.

How about 10% of taxable income?

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