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I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

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Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#621

Post by pm90 »

jmeister wrote: post #612
WoodenChair wrote: post #605

Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…

Ok? 1. That’s his job as an investor. Getting one big outlier prediction right makes up for a hundred wrong ones. 2. These predictions tend to provoke interesting debates(that’s probably Sama’s intent here).

1. If it’s his job at being able to predict, he seems to be doing a bad job by being wrong so many times.

2. There’s so many better ways to spark an interesting conversation than throw bs predictions out on Twitter. If his opinion was informed with facts, he could write a blog or (heavens forbid) a Twitter thread detailing what lead him to the conclusion.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#622

Post by spoonjim »

imgabe wrote: post #312

Higher education in the US is trying to fulfill so many roles it's unsustainable. - teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs - teaching "how to think" and learning about art and culture - Performing cutting edge research - minor league sports teams The large state schools are trying to fulfill all these conflicting roles. We should probably break them out to separate entities. If you have a physicist who's a…

> If we want to train people for specific jobs - create institutions that do that. If the upper class want someplace to send their kids to read poetry and binge drink for 4 years before they get a jr. associate position at their Dad's investment bank, create a separate institution for that.

Well, part of the value of an institution like Harvard is that it connects those two groups of people. Wickliffe IV gets to meet Noah or Kumar or Xiao who got 1600s on their SAT and recommends them to his dad for positions at his investment bank.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#623

Post by the_cat_kittles »

WoodenChair wrote: post #605

Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…

this is a cathartic, beautifully worded comment. there is an incredible tolerance for charlatanery here so long as the charlatan is rich. it drives me insane

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#624

Post by Teknoman117 »

zzt123 wrote: post #601
Teknoman117 wrote: post #590

In reading further down that thread, I had a question about one of the tweets - why would a "zero discrimination" admission environment result in 65% of admitted college students being Asian-American? Assuming a completely unbiased and equal opportunity environment from birth until college (which obviously is not the situation, this just a hypothetical), wouldn't college admissions more or less be equal to the demogr…

That 65.8% seems high to me using benchmarks of UC and Stuyvesant, but it is true Asians would be “grossly over represented” at top schools if not for affirmative action. Thus the current push to enforce affirmative action on the UC system. Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform.

> Turns out minorities are only minorities if they underperform.

I guess it depends on how you classify a minority - e.g. population, education, gender, wealth, income, etc.

Asian-Americans are certainly one of the smallest demographic groups in the US, and even smaller if you split them further by the ethnicity they most identify with (Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, etc.), but as far as UC's student population goes, they do represent the majority of students by a long shot at 40%. The next largest group is the Latino students at 30% of the population and then "white" students at 20%.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#625

Post by bigmadshoe »

esperent wrote: post #615
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact opposite actually. It's a good for-profit enterprise that fails when it's narrative twists it into a public good. The problem isn't that university doesn't work. The problem is that the federal government has propped it up with so much poorly underwritten debt that the prices have ballooned beyond value delivered. That would be fine if the audience taking the debt was rational. But the discourse around univ…

There's plenty of examples of universities being run as not-for-profit and doing just fine. Pretty much all of Europe since the concept of a University has existed, for example. Sure, you can nitpick problems with European universities and they are not perfect. But nobody is going into debt slavery in Europe from getting a degree and nobody is talking about the collapse of European universities. So maybe the problem…

I don't know about the second paragraph. I went to the University of Edinburgh, and being Scottish, the government paid around $2.5k per year for me to attend. Around half of students in my course (CS) there were from outside of Europe, and were paying $50k per year to attend. Was the debt really avoided in my case, or was it just transferred to others?

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#626

Post by pm90 »

WoodenChair wrote: post #605

Sam Altman makes a lot of grandiose predictions and statements. For example, in 2019 he said “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI.” [0] However, most people with domain knowledge in this space still would not want their scan not to be read by a human. The AI radiology apps are generally narrowly focused and useful for…

He and others like him really need to just get off Twitter. Get someone to build a VC only Twitter clone, put their garbage opinions there and satisfy the need to post.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#627

Post by wolverine876 »

tptacek wrote: post #614
wolverine876 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you have some knowledge that I could learn from, but it requires both of us and most of that is inflammatory and hyperbole. Let's both try curiosity and bringing valuable knowledge to the table? > 18 year olds in Bangladesh are a lot more “adult” Imagine an 18 year old in the US. They could go to college and learn more about the world, themselves, etc., or get a menial job, an apartment, and become more adul…

I went to work when I was 18. I don't think I've spent my career doing menial work.

Look how many people have taken this same approach - purposely miscontrue the discussion into a personal attack and respond. Perhaps people who did go to college can also take discussion personally and get mad about others saying they wasted their time and money. Then we'll have an even better discussion!

Yes, I'm saying that you personally - and your dog too - are an ignorant, uneducated, menial worker, who can't count higher than 10 without your toes, while I can count to 1024.

With that out of the way, can we actually talk about something valuable? I see lots of people trying to shut down a reasoned discussion that challenges the orthodoxy (which currently on HN is, college is a waste of time).

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#628

Post by xyzzyz »

xeromal wrote: post #444
xyzzyz wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Americans were less adult in, say, 1930s, when only small fraction of them went to college?

In the 1930s, I'm sure the majority of children worked hard lives on farms and other jobs so they were well on their way to realizing the troubles of adulthood.

US was already majority urban by 1930, though not by much. But yes, you are correct that life was harder back then, which made people tougher.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#629

Post by sarchertech »

heavyset_go wrote: post #296
wolverine876 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom. People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. More importantly, college is about much more than job training. College prepares people to be adults in every way, not to be a resource for corporations…

> People repeat that but what is it based on? Most of the population, including most people who have economic stability and freedom, have not had STEM jobs and very likely will not have STEM jobs. What generation? In my parents' generation, a secretary could get good health insurance for their family and retire with a pension. Today, someone new hired into that role would struggle to afford rent or health insurance f…

STEM jobs don’t put people in that income range, a small subset of STEM jobs do. The majority of STEM careers don’t make 6 figures outside of management.

Re: I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

#630

Post by visarga »

wolverine876 wrote: post #584
rayiner wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you provide an example of that claim? Usually the SAT is considered discriminatory because the way the testing is done favors wealthy, well-educated people, and gives negative results for equally talented people who lack those advantages. The alternatives, such as essays, are even more highly correlated with wealth: https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/essay-content-strongly-rel... As to predicting outcomes, tha…

> No, colleges have found that the SAT produces racial demographics they don’t like. Where does that come from, other than repetition? > look at the LSAT I'm not talking about the LSAT (and bar exam performance isn't a meaningful indicator of much - the great majority of aspiring lawyers pass their bar exams). > Poor white kids have been excluded by the SAT for nearly a century and colleges never took action in respo…

Math, medicine and law don't become any easier no matter how much you avoid testing. At some point they got to know the subjects.
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