71–80 of 188 posts
There should be a filter on HN to hide blog posts that are just technobabble musings with no actionable or definitive information. If I wanted my time wasted I'd troll op-eds in political rags. At least that crap is generic enough that I could have an argument in a bar about it. (or maybe I'm missing the point, and people in SF actually do talk about this shit in bars?)
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> 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 mon…
The only one that isn't public and sparten is not rich amd not elite. All are way more lean than most businesses (If you really want to make money off the back of education... don't. Build your thing and give it away at cost.
But I do understand why someone who only spent time in places like my PhD school would feel differently and view these places as just another industry. I just don't think they are ready for the fact that 90+% of the market competition is way more lean, way more low-profit, and way more human-capital-intensive than any VC is interested in.
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The difference between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer is the latter knows the math behind it. The same for electrician and electrical engineer. I asked the electrician wiring my house to not put the phone wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. He asked why. I said because induction will put a 60 cycle hum in the phone wires. He had no idea what that was. I fired him and did the phone wires myself. When…
I think it'd be a YT engineer who thinks inductively-coupled 120V AC into an extremely low-impedance circuit over a few tens of feet would cause a problem, not an actual EE.
Credentials
I'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…
I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this.
Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test.
So this is your class population; now weed them out.
Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test.
Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them.
You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try.
Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.
>> I am the opposite of a handy person, and I had no idea how to deal with this myself. But I Googled. And sure enough, there are multiple YouTubers operating in the home appliance repair space with sufficient specificity and dummy-friendliness that I was able to fix it. As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people... a mechanic is not a mechanical engineer. An electrician, is not an electrical engi…
Sounds like you're a tech person! I have a problem with my printer, do you think you could help?
Most people go for at least two or more of these reasons. Even if a school is not ideal in a lot of ways, there are no alternatives that provide even a fraction of these benefits.
The only way that I could see higher education disrupted is by the government. If the government created a non-military service where young adults could work for the government, get trained in a career, while fraternizing with other young adults and getting paid a low but reasonable salary, perhaps that could divert people from university. Of course this would probably be mostly students who come from low-income backgrounds, as this service would not fulfill the requisite status and network building requirements that more privileged students seek. Which, now that I think about it, is also why a lot of low-income students attend college. So perhaps this would not work as well.
[1]: Continuation is generous. Often it's a necessary supplement to a watered down, propagandist, taught-to-the-test high school education.
[2]: Especially young adults who are queer, or who do not follow the political or religious beliefs of their parents.
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> Most institutions provide very little signalling value. Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a…
The key differences: 1. if you aren't Stanford, trust is hard to gain, easy to lose, and nearly impossible to gain back once lost. One bad placement raises alarms and more than one poisons the well for an entire degree program. There aren't many regional employers per degree program, and national/global employers are a "reach job" for most students. This is something that non-elite institutions know in a visceral and…
I'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…
I'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…
It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is… With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they…
Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem.
I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.