Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

thenation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 288 posts

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#271

Post by godelski »

solatic wrote: post #262
godelski wrote: post #166

A bit off topic, but honestly meeting people at top schools and mid/low ranked schools, I don't see much of a difference except in the opportunities these people have. Whether it is physics or CS, I don't see a meaningful quality difference in their work, only that the Stanford/MIT/Berkeley kid gets more internships and has an easier opportunity getting a new job if they mess up at their old one. I routinely see peop…

I think there's a classic fallacy here of confusing signals with proof. Admittance to an elite program signals (with higher confidence) higher competency, but it can never prove it, largely because part of what determines competency is emotional engagement, which can naturally change long after admission to the elite program. You would think that there would be arbitrage here on the part of employers - find more peop…

Sure, that's possible. But at least with my observations the likelihood of the samples doesn't line up. It isn't that there's just some duds, it is that there are some duds and nearly all other samples are on par with those of others. Which puts the sampling pretty consistent with a random effect rather than a correlation with school ranking. But such a thing would be incredibly difficult to prove one way or another (that competency strongly correlates with ranking or no effect). But I did give a mechanism for a plausible explanation of no effect. I'll add that at least with csrankings.com if you do a regression analysis there's a huge correlation with ranking and number of faculty, but that should also make sense if you just look at the metric used to rank those schools.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#272

Post by darth_avocado »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #260
darth_avocado wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing the context of my comment. What I meant was most people moving from India don’t move to US purely for “education”, if that was the case, they’d be going back to India after they were done. The parent of my comment was arguing that public education in India (schooling and college) is not great and therefore people move to US. In reality that’s far from the truth. Sure, there’s always exceptions…

My point is pretty simple and obvious. If Indian public education is better, why aren't US students going there (and coming back)? If Indian public education is better, why are Indian students coming to the US? > publicly funded education is never good is just plain disingenuous Pretending that publicly funded education is always good is just plain disingenuous and frankly silly. Anyone who has lived in India will at…

Again, they don’t do it for education, if they did, why don’t they go back to India after their MS or PhD or MBA?

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#273

Post by darth_avocado »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #259
darth_avocado wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, since I can’t edit my other comment, by your logic, if you are able to move from India to US, get into great universities for higher education, I would consider that as a testament to the fact that publicly funded education absolutely works, unless your argument is that only people who went to private schooling can make it here.

> unless your argument is that only people who went to private schooling can make it here Most students who come here are from private schools.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#274

Post by PawgerZ »

jonhohle wrote: post #138
starkparker wrote: post #60

I was in the second high school class to get Louisiana's TOPS program, which at the time gave four years' full-ride tuition plus fees to any public state university with a nominal ACT score and generous GPA requirements (18 ACT and 2.5 GPA IIRC). Wouldn't be here today without it. My parents couldn't afford anything but the closest and shittiest university, with no compsci program (they only had a business computing…

> My parents couldn't afford anything… Not saying its the right way, but grew up without a lot of financial resources, no money specifically to pay for college, and I went to a private 4 year engineering program starting in 1999 by taking out boat-loads of loans. Going into school I had nothing and needed 100% of my tuition covered by loans, grants, or scholarships. I was reasonably confident that having an engineeri…

How did you get the loans? Cosigners with decent credit were required when I looked into loans 5 years ago.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#275

Post by xkcd-sucks »

latchkey wrote: post #118
xkcd-sucks wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think military spending is generally a horrible waste, but it is important to remember that it is a huge jobs program, not just for "people that can't be educated" but also for the defense industry. For example the growth of the Boston "Metro West" region was driven largely by engineers employed by Lincoln Labs, Raytheon, etc. Also the military runs training programs which are probably more practically results…

Isn't that the GI Bill? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

Thinking more of the "schools" inside the services themselves - "Arabic language school", "electronics for radar technicians", "nuclear reactor plumbing" etc.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#276

Post by filoleg »

Gud wrote: post #192
jonhohle wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My parents couldn't afford anything… Not saying its the right way, but grew up without a lot of financial resources, no money specifically to pay for college, and I went to a private 4 year engineering program starting in 1999 by taking out boat-loads of loans. Going into school I had nothing and needed 100% of my tuition covered by loans, grants, or scholarships. I was reasonably confident that having an engineeri…

> starting in 1999 That was almost 25 years ago. A lot of things have changed since then, mostly for the worse. Being young today is intense. Massive student loans(unless your parents are wealthy), extremely expensive rents(unless your parents are wealthy), 10% inflation, etc, etc, etc. Why you should subsidize their education? Because it makes your civilization stronger. You want an educated citizenship for every po…

> That was almost 25 years ago. A lot of things have changed since then, mostly for the worse.

While I agree that the costs have been continuously ballooning and certain things got somewhat worse, their story isn’t just some “back in my day” tale. I graduated college 6 years ago with very similar circumstances to the ones described in that comment.

Georgia Tech, public state school, in-state cost of tuition was around $5k/semester (without any financial aid), got HOPE/Zell Miller scholarship that essentially covers full tuition at any public state college if you maintain a gpa of 3.0. And with some hefty nice gpa bump modifiers for STEM classes that were introduced closer towards my graduation. E.g., so if you got a B (aka 3.0) in your intro to physics, it would count as 3.5 for the purpose of the scholarship eligibility. This wasn’t a school-specific policy, this was the state deciding that for all schools, and it expanded access to the scholarship for even more students.

On top of that, I was fortunate enough to get an RA job after my first year for fall+spring semesters (while interning during off-season), which essentially provided free housing. And while this is not something everyone can do (as the number of RAs needed is limited), HOPE/Zell Miller scholarship covers absolutely everyone who qualifies.

And many states have somewhat similar programs. Can’t speak for all, but one off the top of my head is Florida with their Bright Futures program with somewhat similar requirements covering tuition too. Thanks to this thread, I learned about the Louisiana one too.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#277

Post by tester756 »

godelski wrote: post #218
tester756 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I wish there were exams just like high-school ending exams. This way it aint as relevent where you went, but what your score was, so people from the "bottom" can bootstrap themselves easier. In India there's such a thing >Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) is an entrance examination conducted in India that primarily tests the comprehensive understanding of undergraduate subjects in engineering an…

> That's why I wish there were exams just like high-school ending exams. I'm not sure exams are good at measuring actual abilities. Measuring things is an insanely difficult problem that isn't given enough credit. All too often people think it is just to perform an experiment and measure the outcome but this is really only a tractable when we have a well defined mathematical theory to test our results against. Most o…

All I want, is fair and transparent system that allows me to compete with people from $top_school.

Why somebody from $top_school should have an advantage just because he/she went there, not that they were better?

If I went to $no_name school, but put effort and scored well, then I advertise myself with "scored well", meanwhile now I cant.

No system is perfect, but at least there's minimal amount of bias in standardized tests.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#278

Post by cscurmudgeon »

darth_avocado wrote: post #273
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless your argument is that only people who went to private schooling can make it here Most students who come here are from private schools.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Sorry, that is the truth.

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#279

Post by cscurmudgeon »

darth_avocado wrote: post #272
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is pretty simple and obvious. If Indian public education is better, why aren't US students going there (and coming back)? If Indian public education is better, why are Indian students coming to the US? > publicly funded education is never good is just plain disingenuous Pretending that publicly funded education is always good is just plain disingenuous and frankly silly. Anyone who has lived in India will at…

Again, they don’t do it for education, if they did, why don’t they go back to India after their MS or PhD or MBA?

> Again, they don’t do it for education, if they did, why don’t they go back to India after their MS or PhD or MBA?

Read my original comment. Reread it again. Nowhere did I say, they come *ONLY* for education.

Do you think they don't marry and have kids?

Education being better in the US, doesn't mean ONLY education is better in the US!

If the Indian moving here have kids, marry in the US, they would prefer better education for their kids.

Society is a function of education. US is not better magically better independent of its education system.

To any Indian, your claims are obviously false. If we deny the ground reality, we can't improve it.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/india-education-gap...

https://educationforindia.medium.com/private-vs-government-s...

Just because a govt funds it, doesn't mean it is automatically good (it ought to be, but it is not).

Re: Stop Arguing over Elite Schools. Just Make Public Colleges Free

#280

Post by godelski »

tester756 wrote: post #277
godelski wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why I wish there were exams just like high-school ending exams. I'm not sure exams are good at measuring actual abilities. Measuring things is an insanely difficult problem that isn't given enough credit. All too often people think it is just to perform an experiment and measure the outcome but this is really only a tractable when we have a well defined mathematical theory to test our results against. Most o…

All I want, is fair and transparent system that allows me to compete with people from $top_school. Why somebody from $top_school should have an advantage just because he/she went there, not that they were better? If I went to $no_name school, but put effort and scored well, then I advertise myself with "scored well", meanwhile now I cant. No system is perfect, but at least there's minimal amount of bias in standardiz…

Of course want a fair system, but I'm trying to explain why a fair system is quite difficult to create. It isn't about perfection getting in the way of good enough, it is that we've already been trying your suggestion and that's how we've ended up with the system we're at. To be clear, there is a lot of bias in standardized tests. There's also, as we've discussed, not a strong correlation with test performance and work performance.

But I don't just preach this, I practice this. When I teach I make my students do projects. The projects are far more important than the single test I have (to fit department suggestions). I give them lots of freedom and let them explore. Basically I treat them like junior engineers but let them pick their projects. Honestly, I see all aspects of students improve through this rather than when I tried testing or homeworks because they are more likely to find motivation. Because memory is based on how useful you think something is. Granted I teach a popular class but still. I can definitely judge a student's performance and how much they've learned FAR better from a project or two than from any amount of testing or homeworks. They just don't even compare in ability to evaluate. Problem is, there's absolutely no way to standardize such a thing. In fact, I'm literally arguing that the problem here is that these aspects are diametrically opposed.

The thing is that what sounds nice and "should work" often isn't. It's also often the thing people have already tried. You have to actually embrace the noise and complexity of the environment otherwise you just get hacking. I know it sucks, but you sometimes gotta do things the hard way.

Post reply on HN