Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 1001 posts

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

#691

Post by DiggyJohnson »

snowwrestler wrote: post #592
jhbadger wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published. I'm sure there are some professors who don't do research who make it a point of personal pride or something to keep themselves updated, but there's zero pressure to do so.

No, there is tremendous pressure to be up to date with your teaching because if you’re not, then your students don’t get accepted to highly ranked graduate programs, and that is a significant factor in undergrad college rankings. > If you are doing research you have to be up to date or you don't get things published. Only within the boundaries of your particular field of study, which in most cases is far narrower tha…

I personally think the truth is somewhere in the middle, but do you see how this explanation is based on a very loose relationship between action and evaluation?

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

#692

Post by wolverine876 »

pessimizer wrote: post #284
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…

> 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. This is just middle-class religious belief. And a good one, because middle-class professional people have to reproduce themselves every generation, so they have to center credentialism or fall to working class or poverty. If you're born rich, it's easy to die rich…

I would say the opposite: It's just discrimination to deny people those enormous benefits, of knowledge and skills, based on the wealth of their families.

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

#693

Post by vishnugupta »

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…

> teaching marketable skills so people can get jobs

From Indian perspective I see this part broken big time as well.

It takes 4 years to graduate with an engineering degree where as the core content could very well be taught well under 2 years.

The first year is common across all streams; so one is taught workshop/welding, workings of ICE and what not. 3rd semester the specialisation topics are gingerly introduced with heavy emphasis on adjacent courses (e.g., CS students are taught analogue electronics). Heavy duty math is taught for 4 semesters (PDE, Laplace transforms and what not). Only from 5th semester do the stream-specific topics start in full earnest. Then there are some fluffy courses which don't make any sense if one doesn't have experience working in as a s/w engineer; OOPs, Software Engineering.

What's worse, the syllabus has only been slightly tweaked for last 50 years or so.

I say this as a software engineer professional of 15+ years; I've had to use less than 15% of what I learnt in those 4 years. It's such a waste of precious time. Engineering education needs to radically change in India. Something similar to trade-school in Germany? Part time theory, part time working/interning under professionals? Even that shouldn't be more 2.5 years IMO.

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

#694

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

I went to a college, that shall not be named and was fast from Ivy league, but still has this annoying mindset that the education they provided was for the greater good, and not for lowering yourself to such common activities like finding work.

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

#695

Post by wolverine876 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #393
wolverine876 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you study? I learned so much, I cannot imagine having only the knowledge and intellectual skills that I had from high school.

I studied mechanical engineering and a bit of CS, though I didn't complete the degree. I work as a SWE now. Regarding knowledge and intellectual skills, the vast majority of my knowledge gained in the last ~5 years has been from self-teaching or exploring things I found interesting and I think I developed far more intellectual skills from doing that than going to university. University felt extremely intellectually r…

I wonder if that's a difference between STEM and the humanities - and I wonder how much of the perception of college on HN is based on that experience.

In the humanities, learning in depth (to express it superficially), exploration, and learning the skills of how to learn in those ways, is fundamental; it's the point. Try a humanities program - you would love it!

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

#696

Post by parineum »

NalNezumi wrote: post #572
nostrebored wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European elite go to American schools. Just like the elite from all around the world. The premise is faulty from the onset. Most ‘top’ European schools are mediocre outside of liberal arts degrees.

I wish someone would have told me this is completely false when I was in college, then I wouldn't have been stressed about it. Truth is the education quality doesn't correlate that strongly with "top" University ranking; at above top X ranked university, or top university in respective country, the quality of education is mostly the same. The difference in the ranking only really reflects the research output/opportun…

> the quality of education is mostly the same. The difference in the ranking only really reflects the research output/opportunities and networking opportunities.

I think the point of the top level comment here is exactly what you've said and additionally that the networking opportunities are actually what matter for success.

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

#697

Post by nojs »

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…

> I think he would be wise to learn from Bill Gates that it's a bad idea to over-predict what will happen in the short term.

No, if your job is raising money and motivating people to work for you on ambitious moonshots then optimistically over-predicting is probably the correct choice. You don’t win many points for being “pessimistic but correct” in his line of work.

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

#698

Post by TameAntelope »

Izkata wrote: post #508
TameAntelope wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this glosses over the fact that more people than can be admitted are qualified to be admitted to the schools who "discriminate". When the pool of qualified applicants is 3x your available positions, it seems to make sense to me to attempt to match the population makeup of the United States at large when selecting from that pool, since otherwise you're more or less going to do it randomly. Helping one grou…

A given college can only accept a certain number of students each term. Giving a slot to a less-qualified student necessitates dropping a more-qualified student, making it zero-sum. I'm not talking about Harvard specifically (I don't even know what case you're talking about), this is just the normal state of colleges in the US.

They’re not less qualified, that’s the whole problem.

There is no stack rank of qualified candidates for a collegiate cohort, because it is not a precise or accurate process.

There are more students who apply to Harvard each year with perfect SAT scores and who are valedictorians than there are openings in a given Harvard cohort.

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

#699

Post by erosenbe0 »

hibikir wrote: post #479
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…

What is often missing in the evaluation of US colleges is just how different they are from most European colleges. I compare, for instance, with the Spanish system. A very high percentage of young Spaniards go to college, just like in the US. However, this whole idea of "learning how to learn" and "college is about learning to be an adult" is completely missing there. All the electives that have nothing to do with yo…

The US system is clearly worse and inefficient. Even a GP doctor doesn't finish basic training until about age 30. The whole medical education process has ridiculous amounts of time off -- just wasting human potential -- coupled with redundant learning. It culminates, however, in three years of anachronistic and unnecessary shift work that is a disgusting way of discriminating against pregnant and nursing women by making them work 24 hours at a time. And yeah, they can take time off, but what if they have a baby every year and are never willing to work 24 hour shifts?

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

#700

Post by quartesixte »

wyldfire wrote: post #567
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…

> Major league sports should create and manage their own feeder leagues to develop players, no reason to cram that into a university. Collegiate athletics emerged as lucrative entertainment, over decades. It's not as if they established sports teams originally in order to make money or to become training ground for pro teams. And good luck getting them to forfeit this willingly. A minor league could show up to compet…

And if anything, the colleges were the original sports leagues. The Ivy League was a sports league. Football was a sport done by daring-do young men at Yale and Harvard.

The professionalization of sports is a short history. And college sports becoming the huge media sensation it is today also a recent phenomenon.

Also, Baseball being the outlier to Football/Basketball when it comes to collegiate leagues probably comes from its very early professionalization relative to the latter two.

Post reply on HN