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Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

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Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#101

Post by drc500free »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #49
xbar wrote: 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

Either way, the upvotes were unironic.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#102

Post by IshKebab »

pcmoney wrote: post #19

Its not like those schools are demonstrably better its that those schools are exclusive and provide social connections to elite social classes. The whole point of them existing is to be exclusive more than it is to educate.

I don't know about Harvard but Oxbridge is definitely demonstrably better. The courses are more advanced than other unis and where else do you get 1:2 tutorials with world class professors? They basically always come in the top 3 in UK university rankings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankings_of_universities_in_th...

The networking is not a consideration for the majority of undergrads (aspiring politicians are the obvious exception). Prestige is definitely a factor. But that prestige isn't undeserved.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#103

Post by bradlys »

jcranmer wrote: post #87
rootusrootus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, the student/faculty ratio at a typical "good" college is about 5:1. Even knocking down the projected enrollment one order of magnitude (so 1/40th of the college-age cohort) gets you a 30:1 ratio which is still 6 times worse. What qualifies as a good college, for this description? Typical state school, e.g. Oregon State University? What counts in the 5:1 ratio? Because it sure isn't just teachers, tha…

> Because it sure isn't just teachers, that's probably more like 50:1. How do you figure that? Mean class size at a university is probably in the neighborhood of 30 students. Yes, there are some classes that have monster, 200+ class sizes, but this is also balanced out by senior- or grad-level classes that have a dozen students in them. Students also take several classes, and on average, each instructor only teaches…

I’ve never had a single class with less than 30 students except for ones where the students dropped out mid-quarter. (Ironically one of my smallest classes was one that was for 65+ students but the instructor was so bad that we had less than 20 by end of quarter)

I went to University of Washington - if it matters.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#105

Post by chrischen »

geodel wrote: post #90
chrischen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the value is in the education?

Even more value in exceptional education. So why go to elite university if its not providing that?

Yes they do provide that, but also restrict it because they have no incentive to really expand access to those resources. But part of their value offering is also in the selection process (for the merit based part at least). So they select, provide them with resources, and they really only have to do this enough to maintain their position and status to to sell their product: get an education with the best and brightest in our country. Their product is sold to the 1% of legacy admissions and donors who literally buy their way in. Legacy literally means intergenerational wealth preservation here.

But my point is they only have to maintain their core product well enough to serve that purpose of letting the old money rub elbows with the actual best and brightest. Their goal isn’t to help the second, or third, or fourth best and brightest get the education they deserve.

As someone who hires my goal would be to use these elite college filters, but then try to filter out the legacy admits… but that would be unfair to the truly talented legacy admits. It would be disruptive if somehow that high quality education was scaled so anyone could access it, and that stamp of approval from being associated with the elite colleges was also scaled out and handed to only those that are actually exceptional. For the most part the current system serves the exceptional decently well. Where it fails is with the rest of the population. Given two people of equal 50th percentile exceptional abilities, the one that is really wealthy can buy their way into fake exceptionality and get treated by society as if they were actually smarter.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#106

Post by chrischen »

meowkit wrote: post #79
chrischen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The problem with that lottery is that it still doesn’t solve the problem of artificial scarcity. This is assuming it's a problem that can be solved with simple tweaks or "startup disruption". It's an issue very much related to conspicuous consumption as education >in the Ivy League/cohort Freakonomics[1] just did an episode on this, but I've come across similar data points else where. It's a stamp of not just a goo…

I’d imagine they work nicely for software engineering, but even then a lot of jobs out there are requiring degrees and might attribute too much ti the brand of college. Some sort of objective skill evaluation that is also officially recognized must be implemented in addition to actual knowledge acquisition. As I understand it if you are a doctor and capable in every way if you don’t have the degrees you can’t even be tested?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#107

Post by chrischen »

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #75
chrischen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I completely agree with you. I think it would be best to expand class sizes in addition to this lottery.

Yea or do virtual classes or even video classes with distributed TAs that answer questions.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#108

Post by Hermitian909 »

photochemsyn wrote: post #78

I'm sure experiences vary but I did all my general ed stuff at a very good community college with excellent teachers and a class size of about 20-30 people max per teacher. Many teachers were professionals with other jobs who taught as well, so it was an excellent educational experience, for the kind of things most people take in their first two years at any university. Then I transferred to a well-recognized researc…

> We need more MITs and Caltechs, not more Harvards and Yales.

While this is a very crass over-generalization, I've found you really see this in the graduates. I've found Ivy league school graduates to be sort of... disconnected from reality? Like experts in education who clearly don't understand any of the on-the-ground realities of teaching (your lesson plan is beautifully structured, but we can't use it because it will make the students cry because they're 7). For the crowd here, imagine reading an academic paper about making improvements to production systems from someone who's clearly never been anywhere near one and is glossing over all the important fiddly details. It's like they've been told that they're smart and going to revolutionize their field and they can do so without ever having to get their hands dirty with more messy details.

To repeat my crass over-generalization, MIT and Caltech style schools seem to do a better job of instilling in students the understanding that if you want to change something you need to understand it, and to really understand it you need to spend time in trenches. I've been consistently more impressed with the results graduates from those schools get.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#109

Post by stale2002 »

darawk wrote: post #33
endisneigh wrote: post #5

Status is zero sum, so it’s not even possible to create an arbitrary amount of elite schools to begin with.

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…

> All you're going to do is destroy the signal they provide.

I don't really see what the problem is here. Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a signal recognized sounds like a bad thing to me.

Destroying such a signal sound like a benefit.

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