Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#171

Post by jltsiren » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

haihaibye wrote: post #161

jltsiren wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was describing the old system in Finland, which was similar to many countries in the Continental Europe. Master's degree was the primary undergraduate degree. Bachelor's degree existed on paper, but it wasn't recognized in the society. People often got their bachelor's and master's on the same day. At some point, politicians started promoting bachelor's degrees to get people graduate faster. The academia accepted t…

Instead of sweeping generalisations you should qualify statements if it only applies to long ago in a small non English speaking country. > I'm not familiar with the job market relevance of a bachelor's degree today. It's OK to say nothing if you have no information to add

My point was that people have different cultural backgrounds, and with that different expectations from academic degrees.

A bachelor's degree from the UK is not at all like one from the US, and the differences between PhDs are even bigger. Many European countries consider master's the primary undergraduate degree. A master's may be a research degree, a taught academic degree with/without a thesis, or a professional degree. Law/medical degrees may be graduate or undergraduate degrees. A bachelor's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a master's degree, and a master's degree may or may not be a prerequisite for a doctorate. There may be intermediate degrees between a bachelor's and a master's and between a master's and a doctorate. Not all research doctorates are PhDs. An MD is not necessarily a doctorate, and the doctorate in medicine could be an MD, a PhD, or something else. Having a PhD in medicine may imply that you are not an MD.

Whatever your experiences from the academia may be, the academia is not universally like that.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#172

Post by toss1 » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

syzarian wrote: post #58

Hermitian909 wrote: post #30

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…

>>Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth.

Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough.

My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term.

Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#173

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

clpm4j wrote: post #114

thwayunion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module. I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations. I speak with all types of employers for all types…

It has long been a tradition of Wall Street to hire Ivy grads with name-your-social-studies major (History, Government, English, Philosophy) into investment banking analyst roles. These kids then proceed to live in Excel and Powerpoint for 2+ years. They get hired for the reasons that the parent commenter stated. It's different out here in the tech/startup world - you truly need the skillset beforehand to step into t…

Yes, I understand. I think the last ten years of Ed Tech startups are people from that class losing huge amounts of LP money because they don't understand that this is not how the other 99% of higher education works.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#174

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

t-3 wrote: post #117

thwayunion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is…

How often does an economist ever receive feedback on their theories? AFAICT, only a handful of people make economic decisions at the scale of economic theory.

By "policy levers" I meant the sort that are available to a CFO or director of a mid-sized org, for example.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#175

Post by titanomachy » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 3:51 PM UTC

thwayunion wrote: post #88

HDThoreaun wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are a math teacher, so I suspect your experience is because you are speaking to employers who are looking to hire math students. In that case I agree, calculus is important. For students outside of STEM it’s a different story in my experience.

I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module. I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations. I speak with all types of employers for all types…

Thanks for adding your perspective. I’ve definitely always thought of this problem in terms of what you call the “national/global employers” and I’ve never really considered it in terms of non-elite colleges targeting local job markets.

I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#176

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 4:47 PM UTC

titanomachy wrote: post #175

thwayunion wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a math teacher. I have not taught professionally in a long time, and even then it was temporary and not in math. But I know Calc II in particular is an interesting crucible in terms of students' abilities to learn from an internet module. I work in the software industry and serve on committees/boards for several schools with which I have various affiliations. I speak with all types of employers for all types…

Thanks for adding your perspective. I’ve definitely always thought of this problem in terms of what you call the “national/global employers” and I’ve never really considered it in terms of non-elite colleges targeting local job markets. I’ve always been aware that there are (at least) two tiers of software engineering jobs but I have a hard time articulating the reasons for that. My high school friends seem to do rou…

> My high school friends seem to do roughly similar work to my FAANG-ish job, but for a fraction of the pay, and it bugs me because I know they are smart and deserve more.

A few thoughts follow.

With respect to software work, I have both personal experience and mentoring experience.

First, a lot of the "type of work at FAANG vs. small shop" is extrapolation and guesswork for me. I have experience at both types of places, but in extremely different role types. I've mostly only been in "normal" roles at low-prestige firms, but I've only been in either pure R&D groups or "elite" product groups at high-prestige firms. So, for me, FAANG-style work looks incredibly different and is completely inaccessible to the average student from my alma mater at basically any point in their career, without substantial additional education. A lot of this personal anecdote is due to comparing my career before and after my (more elite-signalling) PhD. So, it's hard for me to know.

Now, in terms of mentoring, I can say some things.

First, the higher paying firms consistently get our best and brightest students. These students are the ones who only pass through our type of institution once every 5-10 years. Those employees are way more versatile, productive, disciplined, and frankly just intelligent. Are they doing to same work? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But FAANG/high finance/et al. does seem to be choosing the absolute cream of the crop. At least from us. They are definitely buying more versatility and higher general intelligence if nothing else. Again, FROM US, a small non-elite school. I know institutional bias means that this may not be true in general.

Second, my impression is that a lot of our students would have a really hard time simply onboarding to tooling at the two FAANGs I know the most about. Think "Java programmer who uses IntelliJ and drops a JAR onto a single VM. Knows about but still isn't very comfortable with things like command lines or version control. Relies on senior engineers for anything more complicated than developing on one or two branches with rare merges and deployment to a single VM". That's a bit of an exaggeration but not far off, so you can see how landing at Google or Facebook might be a painful way for those students to start their career.

FWIW, I think the department is very pragmatics-focused. We aren't failing to teach git because we're too busy teaching automata theory, for example. We don't even teach the latter. So, very focused on software development career prep. But the quality of student and dedication to craft just isn't there. Getting students into internships gives a huge improvement but is still an uphill battle for us. Improving internship placement is therefore a major focus of the alumni's strategic efforts over the next five years. I suspect that with a couple years of full-time work and good mentorship all of our students would be ready for a normal SWE role at FAANG, but straight out of undergrad would fail at even the basics of a FAANG software job.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#177

Post by nasmorn » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

thwayunion wrote: post #86

makeitdouble wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc. 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 knowled…

> 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. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is…

I am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#178

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

nasmorn wrote: post #177

thwayunion wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I assume it is more likely than not that this person is a crank with superficial knowledge and is dangerous when given a stack of cash or access to policy levers. Even for highly literate people, the crucible of feedback is very important. That is…

I am actually a trained economist and I would probably be dangerous if you gave me stacks of cash or access to policy levers. Economics is not like an actual hard science. And the very few things it knows are politically inconvenient and thus mostly ignored.

Fair enough. I suppose using the dismal science as the organizing anecdote in this particular conversation is a point I shouldn't cede :) Maybe something like accounting, corporate finance, or tax law makes for a more interesting conversation.

But then, maybe that's also the point. I also wonder: how many people listen to endless audiobooks on macroeconomics or fiscal policy? How many people listen to endless audiobooks on tax law or corporate accounting?

The CS equivalent might be the number of people who consume endless quantities of data science fluff content on today's-ChatGPT-stable-diffusion-DRL-etc. vs the number of people who spend the same amount of time watching videos on CUDA programming, data cleaning, how to design annotation projects, and so on.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#179

Post by thwayunion » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 5:55 PM UTC

Hermitian909 wrote: post #143

thwayunion wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Most institutions provide very little signaling value. I don't think this is true. Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education. While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offe…

> This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.

To me, it's not at all surprising that "got the [equivalent of a] degree but didn't have the normal level of interaction with faculty" results in a vastly different outcome.

You're assuming that the credential itself is the signal. For regional economies in the US who hire primarily from regional universities, the credential often isn't the primary signal. They'll ask for a reference and actually talk with a faculty member listed.

Colleges and especially individual faculty have ties to major regional employers. Those employers understand that output is more variable (in large part because input in more variable). Other employers don't know anything about the institution at all and are likely to bin the app for any role that isn't eg low-pay or pure commission.

So the institution maintains relationships with alumni and others making hiring decisions at their "strategic" new grad employers, mostly regional small and medium sized companies. Frank assessments from trusted faculty play an important role in securing first placements. This is particularly true for (low-)paid internships, which are often the primary feeder for new grad positions.

If I know that the institution has mixed output and my phone call to the professor listed as a reference is basically "they completed some online modules but we didn't interact much", then I will probably pass.

Re: Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

#180

Post by analog31 » Tue, Dec 13, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

maegul wrote: post #107

analog31 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assessment is a minor technical challenge, but finding people to assess might be a bigger challenge. Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. Everything is speculation unless that number can be nailed down. A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of…

> Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. I'm not sure solitary self-learning is the only type of learning consistent with a disrupting higher education. If technology is to drive change here, I'd argue that a plurality of competing education/learning resources or services from which an indivi…

The "weeder" course isn't intended to be symbolic. It tends to be a course that can only be offered after the students have gotten through the basic math cycle, i.e., 3rd year, and is heavily mathematical / theory oriented. I taught it once as an adjunct -- Electrodynamics in the EE department.

Teachers are fully aware that a "weeder" course is a problem, and make a sincere effort to get as many students through as possible. But nonetheless it results in a lot of attrition.