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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#91
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million. Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced ca…

Quoted post unavailable.

To be fair, replacing an expensive diploma mill with a free/public diploma mill isn't that bad an idea. Probably just too "socalist" for North America. Imagine if everyone could have access to higher education without going into massive debt!

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#92
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They operate a filter to bring in quality people for the benefit of the other legacy students who pay to get in. It’s like how Google shows and gathers organic results… so they can get eyeballs on their paid results. In fact google doesn’t even need to improve their organic results past a certain point as long as it’s good enough to bring eyeballs. Elite institutions thus only need to get a good enough sample of extr…

So why would those who deserve exceptional education go elite universities if there is no value to it?

They go because there is value in the stamp of approval. Harvard's role in the economy is to certify people as being in the top x% of quality. If you are in the top x% and qualify for their stamp, it's certainly worthwhile to go get it, unless you think that you are so exceptional that you can do without it. And some people are, and do, but you generally have to be an order of magnitude or two above x to be certain of that working out for you.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#93
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what these discussions always miss. Harvard isn't conferring value, its recognizing it. It's not a value add, its a filter. People think you can create value by creating more elite universities, but it's exactly the opposite. All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide. You can learn just as much at a non-elite university as an elite one. Attending an elite university just means you were in the…

Your assertion about increasing the top x% is only true in absolute terms. If we're talking top x% of college admissions then that changes the picture. There's a big difference between that top x% being 1,000 and that same percentage being 50,000 students.

Ya, it's certainly possible that we have too few elite universities given the population, or that there's a mismatch there for the absolute numbers. I don't mean to suggest the current arrangement is exactly right.

I just meant to argue against the naive view that we can expand eliteness by letting more people into Ivys, or make more Ivy schools.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#94
If you have high school students you see how destructive and toxic the marketing machines of these ivy league colleges are to young students. I think they just hired ex-tobacco marketers, or some soulless and evil equivalent. They only care about one thing - pumping up the denominator in their acceptance ratings.

Taking the endowments from these leaches is a fantastic idea.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#95
post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

Aspects of this idea will probably not work out, most especially the math, from the first few answers. The baby that HN has in the bathwater is the infrastructure aspect. The arguments for physically centralized educational institutions as a necessity rather than a luxury good are very weak outside of programs with practical physical components, which I would imagine to be a big chunk of STEM and the fine arts. That sort of physical infrastructure — labs, studios, theaters — is itself much more distributable and interchangeable at the undergraduate level than in the current system. The technology to hold lectures and seminars remotely is fully mature, and even if physical needs remain, those needs can be met by local infrastructure. Pedagogically, development of wider course standards and more sophisticated modes of course credit assignment are both feasible information-architecture level projects, and all these things taken together could transform education from a credential gateway implicitly knitting social networks designed to retain power to a ubiquitous more cloud-like environment focused purely on the learning, scholarship, and research that is needed to actually keep the wheels from falling off society.

A lot of people are less welcoming of OP's style now that the ranks of the very online are less exclusively populated with socially primitive young men jockeying with each other for imagined status, but aside from the ludicrous belief that he might have solved major problems by taking a half-assed crack at them, he's not wrong to be going big on this. Of course everything we come up with is going to be impractical bullshit. At best some posters with real and interesting knowledge will be rustled out of the bushes. But people should be thinking about the gap between what we actually need, what we actually have, and what could be done with the means at our disposal.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#96
post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

This solution is missing the chance at connections made by attending a school teeming with the useless scions of the rich, who will be handed plum jobs upon graduations. You're not going to have a chance to hook up with something like Skull & Bones sitting there doing remote learning the way you will by coughing up the fees to attend one of the Ivy League schools.

I think this is overrated. I went to a rinky dink community college. It was a very urban school (meaning, no grassy hillside campus, we were in the middle of NYC and students had jobs and families to go) and did not have a campus life, so I didn't make many connections with my other students. I still ended up with a great degree in CS and a great job. For sure if I went to a campus I'd have more opportunities to network and maybe be further in my career, but I achieved success without that.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#97

Tangential to the suggestion of taxing endowments, I like Michael Sandel's idea of turning admissions into a lottery once a threshold is met. E.g. anyone with a GPA above x and a SAT score above y with a personal essay judged to meet quality level z (simplifying for illustration) is told that they have passed the acceptance threshold and are entered into the random lottery. The threshold should be set so that student…

The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. There is no reason why a “Harvard” level class is restricted to just a room full of people. We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses and make education vastly cheaper but we choose not to for some reason. I think part of YC’s philosophy is basically this. Think making startups accessible r…

Harvard is a good example of artificial scarcity. They have an extension school[1], where they advertise that you'll be given a Harvard education, by Harvard faculty, virtual or at the Harvard campus. It has somewhat open-enrollment, and thousands of people enroll every year. They're happy to take their money, but the students aren't allowed to say they're a Harvard graduate, they have to say they're "Harvard Extension School" graduates.

Harvard knows it's whole mystique is based on elitism and the artificial scarcity it creates by denying people admission.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Extension_School

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#98
post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

I can't tell if this is real or a parody of the SV ed-tech solution-ism of the last decade

Yeah, what could be so hard about buying a 50 billion dollar "big computer" and hiring 10,000 PhDs for an online platform that doesn't exist yet? Ha!

It's real for sure though, this is HN after all. The general idea of free public universities based on an open curriculum is good, but whatever the OP is talking about is not going to get us there.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#99
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From sources like this [1], it looks like the cohort of high school graduates is usually between 3 and 4 million. So that means the total college-eligible cohort is 12 - 16 million. Let's say 25% (a fourth) of them end up attending this magical national public college. That's a 3000000 / 10000 = 300:1 ratio of students to teachers. That's a lot of students per PhD to handle, for a $100k salary with greatly reduced ca…

Quoted post unavailable.

Uninformed tech people are better than a lot of experts in many fields. Wouldn't be the first time. Bezos responded to COVID faster than the NIAID.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#100
post #25

Dumb. Leave the elite game to the elite game players. Here's the solution: 1. Invest $50 Billion in a big computer. 2. Stuff it full of standard courseware 3. Hire 10,000 PhDs @ $100,000/yr remote ( 4. Have them grade tests 5. Declare it an accredited university. 6. Make it free to attend 7. Never expire units accumulated Congratulations, you have created a national public college for pennies. The quality of the educ…

Since this is HN I just want to point out that $50 Billion will buy you 50 new exaflop systems [0]. That’s a lot of awfully big computers to use as web servers.

You could probably deploy most of the courseware using Netlify for a few grand per year. Then you could put that 50 billion in an endowment. I don’t really know how those work, but I’m guessing with a 5% return you’re making 2.5B/year giving you an extra 25k teachers at $100K each. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugaku_(supercomputer)

Update: frontier [1] is faster and cheaper but my point stands.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)

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