Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel • Hacker News Board

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#181

Post by forgotusername6 » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #179

logifail wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures. Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I…

It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer. The onl…

What you are describing doesn't really compare. I'm sure it would do a reasonable job, but focused individual attention is really hard to replace. Most of what you've described happens at Oxbridge in addition to tutorials/supervisions.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#182

Post by logifail » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #179

logifail wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We totally have the technology and capabilities to scale it to the masses If you're an undergraduate at Oxford[0] or Cambridge[1] you can expect to have multiple weekly sessions where two or three students get a session with a professor or postgraduate to go through material that's been presented in lectures. Does this scale? Based on my experiences (six years in total, three on each side of the table as it were) I…

It can, very easily. Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer. The onl…

> Have students watch a lecture and read the accompanying text, then have them take a quiz, then have a review session where the most missed quiz questions are covered, along with popular questions submitted beforehand. Finally, set up study groups to let peers answer easy questions, and have virtual office hours/email for the few remaining difficult questions that peer groups can't answer

With respect, I don't believe that approach could work for the combination of the type of material covered and the type of (often open-ended) questions and discussions that resulted from it.

One of the questions I recall being asked to solve for a first-year Physics tutorial was "estimate the change in the length of the Earth's day if all the vehicles in the UK were to swap to driving on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left"

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#183

Post by seibelj » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:42 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #153

seibelj wrote: post #2

> To break up elite colleges therefore, all you need to do is break up the endowments. Siphoning resources from school endowments is actually quite easy. Wow straight up suggesting we steal money from private institutions to give to politicians to decide how to redistribute it. Totally insane. The government prints $40 billion like it’s nothing. We literally just handed out trillions minted out of thin air. Maybe we…

I honestly don't understand this colloquial language of "printing money" just call it what it is, borrowing money or just plain old debt. There is no need for secret ingroup language or additional indirection, there is no conspiracy here. The real world is more boring than you think. The government borrowed money and increased its debts by trillions of dollars, that alone is insane enough, there is no need for some m…

However you want to phrase it, politicians can pass a bill and get $2 trillion to hand out instantly. They don't need to seize money from private institutions and billionaires to fund their waste.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#184

Post by rgrieselhuber » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

ryan93 wrote: post #180

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about destruction but equity. Tax-funded student loans should not be used to grow endowments and should be sequestered. Let donors fund the endowments if they care about the research institutions. Return the people’s money to the people.

Donors do fund endowments. The schools most dependent on tuition have very small endowments. You don’t seem to know anything about this

Are you saying that no tuition backed by student loans ends up in endowment funds?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#185

Post by rgrieselhuber » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:46 PM UTC

Jtype wrote: post #178

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not about destruction but equity. Tax-funded student loans should not be used to grow endowments and should be sequestered. Let donors fund the endowments if they care about the research institutions. Return the people’s money to the people.

Take an economics course.

Which economics course explains the workings of endowment funds at elite schools and the flow of money from student loans?

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#186

Post by moralestapia » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:52 PM UTC

burnished wrote: post #165

danrocks wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is quite the claim to be making without providing any details. I feel it does not strengthen your argument to do so.

A personal anecdote isn't an argument.

Thanks @burnished.

I cannot do much more other than telling my story. People are then free to reach their own conclusions. I wish I've read something like this before going there so that is part of the reason why I share it.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#187

Post by geomark » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 1:58 PM UTC

Hermitian909 wrote: post #126

caffeine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At my old job in the UK, we always got better results hiring engineers from Imperial College (which is the UK attempt at an MIT/Caltech-type of school) than from Oxbridge. We eventually figured out that the Imperial students had written thousands and thousands of lines of code by the time they graduated, in several different types of languages (Prolog, Haskell, C, Verilog, Java, Python, Javascript) and at all levels…

This all makes sense though for clarity I think I'm discussing something a little different. I don't generally feel like MIT students aren't particularly less or more well versed in theory than their peers at Harvard. However the approach taken to solving big problems feels very different. I think a story is illustrative. One of the more impressive people from MIT I know got their degree in electrochemistry. After wo…

I read comments like yours with interest because I used to be a hiring manager at a big aerospace company where I ran a department doing some cool stuff - signal processing, novel computer architectures, VLSI and WSI chips. We always recruited at top schools and got a few engineers from MIT. They were brilliant, but good grief they were lousy engineers. One guy was obviously a genius and generated great ideas constantly but he could never get anything done. Week after week he was always two weeks from finishing his next milestone...and never did. Another guy told me that, as his boss, my job was to make sure he was happy to come to work every day. I told him we would both be better off if he did a good enough job to make me happy every day. And another said he didn't think there was any work worth his attention at the company, yet he was still there scraping by year after year. Small data set, but I was discouraged from recruiting there after going 0 for 3. I wish I had hired someone like you knew.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#188

Post by asdadsdad » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

dfadsadsf wrote: post #170

mmarq wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The UK just codified this into visa law. It’s going to be very funny when they realise that nobody with a Harvard or a ETH Zurich degree is going to spend 3K£ for the privilege of moving to the UK, where they will earn a third of what they would be making home. Then the government will water it down as they did with salary requirements, finally they’ll blame the “talent” shortage on the EU and on millennials eating…

That’s just not true. London is huge talent magnet and salaries/TC at top tech companies are about 75-80% of Bay Area and comparable to Zurich. London is also fun place to live compared to cultural wasteland of bay area. 3k visa fee is frankly irrelevant when you consider full cost of moving.

that's ok, but then you have 2 years of visa and have to find something else to stay.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#189

Post by strikelaserclaw » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

mrtksn wrote: post #162

isolli wrote: post #140

The situation as seen from France is odd. Here, elite STEM universities are free, and the very best ones even pay their students. Having legacy admissions would be unthinkable; it's the opposite of meritocracy. And you don't need to "socially" prepare since birth with all the right extra-curricular activities.

Considering that the US universities consistently rank among the top and they do produce the significant portion of the groundbreaking innovation and technology, maybe the American model has a merit? If you think about it, legacy admissions strengthens the connection of the alumni(which is likely to have significant career progress at the time of their offspring attends college) with the institution and gives them re…

I would postulate US universities ranking among the top and producing groundbreaking innovation and technology is more a function of US being a cultural, economic hegemony for the past 80 years than it having some magical "system" that works. Before WW2, when you think of groundbreaking research you think of USA as a backwater compared to Europe. It is also my feeling that this American system is going to unravel in tandem with its economic/cultural collapse if nothing is done to heavily modify the rigged system.

Re: Break Up The Elite College Seats Cartel

#190

Post by buzzy_hacker » Thu, Jun 02, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #120

buzzy_hacker wrote: post #28

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…

no one, especially not some random contemporary, owns the idea of using a lottery once a threshold is met. that concept has been thrown around for millenia to pick lots of all sorts. i've even suggested it as a reasonable approach to hiring right here on hn, and didn't even need to crib the idea off anyone else to do so. it's a rational solution for a decision system under high, but not unbounded, uncertainty.

Not saying Michael Sandel owns the idea, I first heard it in his book Tyranny of Merit.