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So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?
Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..
So, this whole thing is an attempt do argue against Bernie Sanders proposed universal free college tuition by comparing it to a country that offers free college tuition and is used as an example of a better system by the author?
Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..
However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hope of getting out. Scott has a post on these awful equilbriua called Meditations on Moloch that's pretty depressing:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I can see one way of maybe getting out of this. If one nice country was to implement this examination-based approach and then offer citizinship to those who score very well on a "general degree examination" (basically an intelligence test) they might be able to setup a brain-drain dynamic that would maybe push us out of this awfulness.
Said country could even subsidise the very brightest with the equivalent of a signing bonus. Even a permanent no-strings-attached basic income for the brightest of the bright would be very cheap as they're so rare, and may be worth it for the positive externalities as they're the type of people who build new industries. "We'll pay you to live, work, learn, and be credentialed here" may be enough to dull the luster of the ivies.
Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down. However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hop…
A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of actual working code in it is much better than an hour of writing pseudocode on a whiteboard.
Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down. However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hop…
Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures). A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of ac…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah and his analogy is plain wrong. Bernie Sanders is saying to make the tulips free, not to give everybody enough money to buy them..
"Making college free" is identical in every meaningful way to giving everyone who wants to buy it enough money to buy it.
"Here's the government school. Anyone can go there for free."
"Here's $50,000. Spend it at any school you want."
Without advocating one or the other, it's clear that these scenarios are not going to produce the same results at all.
In fact, there's been a great deal of debate about whether or not the second scenario ("school vouchers") is a good idea.
I take a more classical view on University: It never should be "job training". It should be about general life enrichment, beyond-industry research, philosophy about the world and its workings, and broadening horizons. Sure, people who went through that (ie, independently interested in, was recommended in or could afford it, and succeeded) tended to be more capable people. Let's roughly compare it to becoming an Eagl…
> It should be about general life enrichment This is a view that rich people can afford to hold. Poor or middle class people cannot reasonably afford to pay four years of opportunity cost, plus tuition, for "general life enrichment." The Ireland control serves well here too. Are Irish medical doctors, and indeed all European doctors, less "enriched" than American ones? I'm very skeptical of this idea, but if you coul…
...In countries that don't subsidize higher education to a point where this isn't a problem.
We can debate whether the cost to society is worth it, but just because something is out-of-reach in the status quo doesn't mean it's impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures). A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of ac…
Of course they are a proxy, but they are much better and cheaper proxies. I was assuming that credentialism would remain - examination-based degrees make credentialism much less costly.
I don't see any compelling reason for thinking that the degree of knowledge that can be measured on a one hour (or even a five hour) exam is comparable to the degree of knowledge that can be measured from a larger body of work (whether that work represents continuing interaction between an instructor and student over the course of a semester, or a self-directed large-scale portfolio project).
I'm probably showing my age here, but in the heyday of Novell there was a phenomenon called the "paper CNE". The military has long referred to those who've gone through an abbreviated officer training process as "ninety day wonders" (not a compliment). Other examples abound.
The author was doing great right up until the last paragraph. His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. Then there is also the large grey area in between, in which a university education in certain fields might be useful but not essential. What he would do is abolish the right of those professions in…
His proposed solution is silly because it makes no distinction between jobs for which a university education is essential and those for which it is irrelevant. His solution is to evaluate people as people, not by external indicators. If it so difficult to tell if someone has a university education or not without having to explicitly ask, then perhaps it isn't as essential as you seem to think?
It is trivially easy to think up questions that any Computer Science student from a non-crappy university will be able to answer, but someone without a degree probably will likely not be able to answer. Just pick a particularly challenging problem off of an Algorithms or Linear Algebra final and hand them a textbook and an hour.
The question is how to ask questions that matter for a particular job. If the job is hacking out an e-commerce site, it's really easy. If the job is designing a distributed system for real-time processing of data at 100s of GB/s of data that nobody has tried processing at that speed before, the single set of questions that tell you whether this person is competent is far less obvious. What you really need is to engage with the person in weeks or months worth of examinations on various subjects. Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this.
Everyone who's looked into this issue knows the solution is to use examinations rather than education - a degree should be given if you can pass some stringent examinations regardless of how the knowledge got into your head. You separate instruction from assessment and the incentives work out much, much better. And the cost goes way, way down. However, we are stuck in this horrible equilbrium and I don't see much hop…
Examinations are just a proxy measure (like grades in general). They have historically been used for logistic reasons, many of which no longer exist (or are much less compelling). They stick around for the same reason that everything else sticks around in academia: Because It Has Always Been So (another example: lectures). A portfolio of actual work is much better than an examination. A github repo with a bunch of ac…