College is not just about getting an education. An equally important part of a traditional college education is finding out who you are as a human being. Living with others full time, perhaps for the first time. The growth I experienced in those 4 years of college was unlike anything else in my lifetime.
Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
61–70 of 188 posts
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#62For me, this discussion brings up a question I've had: How well do the HN remote batches work compared to the in-person batches?
My hunch (and it's only a hunch) is that there's something essential about in-person learning that technology, to date, hasn't captured... and that's why it hasn't disrupted higher ed.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#63I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first. It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone…
What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?
in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.
is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#64Easy: higher ed is all about the credential.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#65I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers. Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first. It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone…
> Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order: 1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges betwe…
You are both right, honestly.
Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.
However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn.
Making money by educating people is a bad business. It is expensive and time consuming and the more you try to cut expenses the worse the education gets. Non-profit is the right model for it.
If you really want to make money off the back of education build something useful for colleges and universities. They are big complex organizations with specialized needs where off the shelf solutions don’t cut it and there are enough of them to make a nice business out of if you come up with a solution that is dramatically better than what is out there. A lot of the technology solutions that are used barely work but there are few options.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#66Universities have been around for thousands of years. Good universities offer a unique combination of factors - people of the same age group, professors and a distinct atmosphere that encourages learning. How are you going to teach science and engineering courses where you need access to labs? And, university is where you get a chance to meet people from diverse fields and backgrounds, get exposure to challenging poi…
> people of the same age group
Why is this an advantage?
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#67Knowledge acquisition is, in practice, a problem that is not well understood.
From empirical evidence it seems that 1:1 mentoring could be the best system ever found.
With a tech close enough to AGI, it might be possible to have an even better 1:1 mentoring with infinite scale.
There are clearly unknowns and probably unknowns unknowns on this path, but the potential positive effects are too important to pass.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think most other countries don’t think there’s a problem. Because their college educations don’t cost several years of annual income, compounded at interest rates double what a car loan used to go for.
Even in countries where college is free, students do typically give up several years worth of annual income in opportunity costs
You're presenting an entirely new assumption, compared to what most people are discussing: that obtaining a bachelor's degree equivalent education can be done in significantly less than 4 years of full time study. In my experience, I don't believe that to be the case.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#69The article's title is a rhetorical question with answer that ends in: "Motivation and self-discipline are valuable commodities, and an in-person instructor can help provide them."
Exactly. Graduating college proves a level of diligence more so than intelligence or knowledge. This is undervalued. Many of the smartest coworkers I have worked with were the worst colleagues. Intelligence and knowledge is only so valuable if hard work and interpersonal skills are absent.
Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?
#70AI tutoring and hiring will inevitably disrupt education. A degree is a really poor heuristic of someone's ability to do a job and AI will be able practice mastery learning with every pupil (only moving on to the next subject once the current one is mastered) and precisely identify and drill where they are struggling. On the hiring side I also can't see the status quo surviving, it costs so much employee time to interview and it's done so unevenly with such bias and even with multiple rounds and committees you still get poor signal. This is fundamentally a classification problem. The proctoring and suggested scoring will be done by AI with maybe human review at the end. Hopefully these are opensource and using open datasets so biases can be challenged but I can see this also devolving into proprietary models. Well regarded AIs might give out a (cryptographically) signed certificate that you are x percentile technically and even behaviorally or even going so far as to recommend a specific role and company where you'd fit in the most.