Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
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Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#2What is it about this subject that encourages such hyperbole and overgeneralization?
For what it's worth, I looked it up (thanks linkedin) and the author of this piece spent four years at some place called Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, getting a BA in History, Philosophy, French and German. It's possible that her personal experiences may not generalize.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#3What is it about this subject that encourages such hyperbole and overgeneralization? For what it's worth, I looked it up (thanks linkedin) and the author of this piece spent four years at some place called Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, getting a BA in History, Philosophy, French and German. It's possible that her personal experiences may not generalize.
Hah. I was wondering that myself. I think it's sort of a sacred cow that higher education is good and beyond reproach, and that obtaining more formal education is usually a good idea.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#4I have a sneaking suspicion that people overestimate their own intelligence and the rigor of their education. I'm skeptical that education has truly gotten worse, and suspect that people like this lady have forgotten how dumb they used to be.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#5Posts like this -- without any actual data/standards -- annoy me. I suspect that she perceives the quality of college education to be worse because she perceives the quality of college graduates to be worse. This may even be true.
However, if this is the case, I don't think it's realistic to expect the standard of college graduates to be on par with what they were a generation ago or whenever she went to college, simply because there are so many more of them now, and college students are no longer mostly people who have self selected as unusually interested in learning/furthering their education and, for the most part, affluent.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#6What is it about this subject that encourages such hyperbole and overgeneralization? For what it's worth, I looked it up (thanks linkedin) and the author of this piece spent four years at some place called Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, getting a BA in History, Philosophy, French and German. It's possible that her personal experiences may not generalize.
For what it's worth, nothing in the article discusses her personal experiences or generalizes from them.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#7What is it about this subject that encourages such hyperbole and overgeneralization? For what it's worth, I looked it up (thanks linkedin) and the author of this piece spent four years at some place called Linfield College in McMinville, Oregon, getting a BA in History, Philosophy, French and German. It's possible that her personal experiences may not generalize.
For what it's worth, nothing in the article discusses her personal experiences or generalizes from them.
You're right -- she skips the discussion of her personal experiences and jumps straight into the generalizations.
"Our higher education system largely fails to educate... It’s nothing less than a deep institutional, cultural, societal and indeed humanitarian crisis."
Really? I could have sworn that I learned a bunch of stuff about physics and pure mathematics in my four years of intensively studying physics and pure mathematics, but maybe I'm just crazy.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#8In answer to her question ("what does it mean to be educated"), Robin Hanson, an economist/blogger, suggests:
The claim I’m most confident of: school is mostly not about the material taught in classes. I’m less sure to what extent it is about learning-to-learn, coming-to-obey, bonding with other kids, and signaling these features as well as intelligence and conscientiousness. I’m pretty sure signaling of various sorts is at least 30% of the average private value of school, and it could go as high as 80%.
More interesting discussion can be found here:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/functions-of-school.ht...
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/04/kling-on-school.html
Also, an interesting post by economist Bryan Caplan:
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2010/08/bill_dickens_ve....
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#9Posts like this -- without any actual data/standards -- annoy me. I suspect that she perceives the quality of college education to be worse because she perceives the quality of college graduates to be worse. This may even be true. However, if this is the case, I don't think it's realistic to expect the standard of college graduates to be on par with what they were a generation ago or whenever she went to college, sim…
I hope the author is reading this. I'd love to see the look on her face when she sees you guessing that she went to college "a generation ago", when the post starts with a big picture of her.
She graduated in 2006.
Re: Peter Thiel Is Wrong About Higher Education (It’s Worse Than A Bubble)
#10One explanation of the possible higher education crisis could be that we simply have higher expectations. The world is moving faster and our education system hasn't caught up. Our grandparents typically stayed with the same company for decades, but we change jobs every couple years. Not only are we changing companies, we're changing skill sets. New competencies emerge and vanish in the course of years, not centuries. This is a very new development.
Were universities always a mediocre way to get an education? By today's standards - yes. The thing is, "mediocre" is a relative term.