Live data from Hacker News

The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

blogmaverick.com

181–190 of 302 posts

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#181
The analogy to the mortgage market is wishful thinking. Remember the massive fraud that led to the easy lending that led to the money drying up when the fraud was discovered? There is no similar pattern of activity in traditional education.

Higher education disruption is unlikely. It is difficult for an uneducated person to accurately assess the value offered by a school.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Google also notorious for being biased towards the "top" schools, caring about GPAs and turning away a ton of smart people? That's what I've heard, but I've no first-hand experience. So many smart people apply to Google that they could (at least historically--maybe it's different now) get away with a hiring process optimized for false negatives over false positives. This is only fair, but also probably makes th…

I guess the reason why companies with a high application volume (like Google) tend to be biased towards "top" school and using your GPA as a selection criteria, is that it is so much easier to "cut the pile in half" and still have a decent number of good candidates, only the average talent might be higher. It reduces the overhead in the HR department. That means a lot of smart people never get the opportunity to try…

What you say makes sense for the screening rounds - resume shortlisting and a phone screen. These are centered around rejecting candidates. But face to face interviews are supposed to be the other way. As far as I know, Google asks for the GPA mostly towards the end. That doesn't save them any time. It shows they care about academics.

On a general note, is there any company that tries to extract patterns out of their employees performance track records; like a feedback loop into their interview process?

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, at least in much of the US, teaching special needs teachers requires extra certification on top of a normal teacher's license. Without all kinds of extra classes on the various psychological and physical disorders that they deal with in their classrooms, the extra classes seem pretty justified.

Of course you need extra certification for teaching special needs. That's not the point. My question is, do you need a college degree for it? I used this example because it relates to my mother, who recently got a master in this field. First of all, I'm proud of how my mother pulled that off at that age, while still working at her old job! That said, the courses were largely theoretical mixed with a minuscule amount…

The purpose of a University Degree (even a post graduate one) has never been to allow an academic career. It has always been the case that these degrees are necessary but not sufficient for an academic career but in the vast majority of cases Masters and Ph.D's go off and do other things instead - like practice in their field. In terms of educational psychology there is a very active and inquisitive community of research developing a number of strands of theory. I don't know very much about it at all, but some of what I have seen with respect to cognition, learning and development is impressive. Some is less so - but all of the people who I have met who are working on this agreed and wanted to change that, which I view as healthy.

As an aside if you were to (honestly) think about almost all fields of inquiry (maths may get a pass, possibly) then I think that you would have to agree with the statement "those professors didn't know that much to begin with and neither did many of the students". We are pretty ignorant about more or less everything when you look closely.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#186

Here's a revolutionary idea: let's make bankruptcy easier. I've paid more than I borrowed, and I still owe more than I've paid. I have dozens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, and I'm on the doorstep of defaulting on some of it. Mark Cuban's right. The money is insanely easy for everyone to get. Sallie Mae, AES, and the rest are happy to give students money. Colleges are happy to take money from students,…

So when this debt is dismissed from your balance sheet who repay's the lender?

Apart of the reason of the low cost to borrow for student loans is baked in the non-dismissal of the debt. It lowers counter-party risk for the lender therefore they will give a lower rate to the borrower.

If you allow student loan debt to be dismissed with bankruptcy then you increase counter-party risk and increase the cost of those loans originally.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#187
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you need extra certification for teaching special needs. That's not the point. My question is, do you need a college degree for it? I used this example because it relates to my mother, who recently got a master in this field. First of all, I'm proud of how my mother pulled that off at that age, while still working at her old job! That said, the courses were largely theoretical mixed with a minuscule amount…

The purpose of a University Degree (even a post graduate one) has never been to allow an academic career. It has always been the case that these degrees are necessary but not sufficient for an academic career but in the vast majority of cases Masters and Ph.D's go off and do other things instead - like practice in their field. In terms of educational psychology there is a very active and inquisitive community of rese…

I think you misunderstand me. I didn't use this phrase in a philosophical way. I'm talking about professors teaching statistics and not knowing the difference between the median and the mean. I'm talking about that level of incompetence.

Imagine a course on compiler design where the professor doesn't know what top-down parsing and lexical analysis is. I'm certain that you would call that class a failure, or not?

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#188

Mark Cuban writes: "As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper." So, I suppose I could be wrong, but I would be willing to bet a great deal of money that Mark Cuban d…

20 years ago, if you had told people that the world's most widely-read source of general knowledge would go out of print and be replaced by a website editable by anyone, anywhere, people would have said you were crazy.

But that did happen. Yale may not "go out of print", but I don't find it hard to imagine new online schools competing and winning in the battle to redefine education.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#189
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google seems to be able to figure out smart folks in 5-6 hours with pretty high accuracy.

Isn't Google also notorious for being biased towards the "top" schools, caring about GPAs and turning away a ton of smart people? That's what I've heard, but I've no first-hand experience. So many smart people apply to Google that they could (at least historically--maybe it's different now) get away with a hiring process optimized for false negatives over false positives. This is only fair, but also probably makes th…

Well, funny

I know about people with no college education being interviewed at google

You can blame google for having a broken interview process but it appears 99% of their assessment comes from the interview and it really doesn't matter if your major is in pet grooming or math

Edit 'cause I can't answer: Not "friend of a friend" account, but directly from the concerned person

'"99% of their assessment comes from the interview." Indeed, it's the very opposite since the interview is not where you show that you can |excel in multiple areas."'

I don't believe you are familiar with the Google selection process. The importance of academic achievement (for engineering positions especially) is underrated by google.

You may shine in academia, if you don't get almost a perfect score in the interview you're out.

Re: The Coming Meltdown In College Education & Why The Economy Won’t Get Better Soon

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's all your resume says, then you're probably right. But there should be something on there that indicates that you can do the job otherwise you wasted your time applying. The point is that education says nothing about being able to do the job in many cases. If you are applying for an engineering position and you have MIT on your resume, that is certainly going to imply that you very likely have what it takes.…

The point is that education says nothing about being able to do the job in many cases. I work with students for development projects. We don't get to pick them, they pick the projects we propose. Here's a question that tells us in seconds whether we're going to have a tough project with a lot of pussyfooting or one that'll go mad with ideas: Do you have tech-related hobbies? Most barely have a few hobbies but some ar…

I wonder how many accountants, lawyers and doctors have "hobby" projects in their respective fields. And whether they get asked that in interviews.
Post reply on HN