Against Tulip Subsidies • Hacker News Board

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#41

Post by Futurebot » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 8:59 PM UTC

We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm...

Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer it be universities themselves) give you a full ride (not just tuition, but books, room and board, transport, food, etc.) and you'd pay them out of your gross income after you graduate. The big difference is that just about anyone who is willing to give up the percentage could get it. Sticker shock and rising bills do not come into play. Right now, you're at the mercy of the financial aid system and all its fickleness (relatives make too much/too little, you have too many/too few assets, you are in a high CoL area and loans don't cover anywhere near what you need, the amount they're willing to give you shifts with the political winds, etc.)

The advantages of this system are that you would never have to worry about your relatives being able to fund you; you wouldn't need to work while going to school; you would not need to reapply each year and hope you get enough; and there's no issues with bankruptcy or anything else (the obligation would be non-dischargeable, just like now, but since it's a percentage, the sting is much less.) Instead, the money would all be there the whole time.

On the investor side, it would be like VC: most people would produce standard returns (let's say 5-15k a year), while a few Elon Musks and Larry Ellisons would return billions - I'm sure many universities would be happy to occasionally get one of those.

In any case, there's no way it could be /worse/ than the system we have now.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#42

Post by nmrm2 » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:00 PM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #39

morgante wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google. I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.

"Less probable" is still competing for the same jobs. Perhaps not as well, but competing nonetheless.

I call this the Einstein fallacy. It says that quality Q is of questionable relevance/utility/value because there exist people without quality Q that do X, even though the vast majority of people who do X have quality Q. But that argument is kind of insane.

If you want a job at Google, you're much better off getting a degree from a good university. Anyone who says otherwise is delusional.

(EDIT: And no, App Academy graduates do not -- on balance -- compete for the same jobs as recent Stanford graduates. On balance, they compete for very different jobs and have far lower starting salaries. The existence of exceptional outliers is not a good basis for policy or decision making.)

(edit2: whoever just downvoted every single post I made on this article: the reply button is there for a reason :-) Otherwise, the early career salary for Stanford is $97,100. Are you saying that the average app academy graduate makes ~6 figures right after finishing the academy?)

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#43

Post by SilasX » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #40

mrestko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He somewhat address this in the article. Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment".

> Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment". "Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday. And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people)…

>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday.

So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college?

Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading. Life teaches you unknown unknowns.

The structure of a university is not uniquely suited for teach you that; its comparative advantage lies in teaching knowledge that you just can't learn in practice because because of the theoretical background needed to piece together the big picture. That's not the same thing as unknown unknowns, and to whatever extent it teaches those is not because it's uniquely optimal to teach them.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#44

Post by nmrm2 » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:06 PM UTC

Futurebot wrote: post #41

We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm... Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer i…

10% of all future income

The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#45

Post by Futurebot » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:09 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #44

Futurebot wrote: post #41

We could try the "Unincorporated Man" (aka equity-based) approach to paying for higher ed: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/04/unincorporated-man.htm... Instead of paying with loan money or hoping for grants, anyone could go if they will give up (for example) 10% of all future income (this is not the same as "income-based repayment.") Instead, a system like this would have whoever is buying the shares (I'd prefer i…

10% of all future income The general idea is interesting, but this is an insane amount of money for most college graduates, who would be far better off with even unsubsidised loans.

Percentage is definitely up for debate. Maybe MIT/Harvard/Stanford could do 8-10% and University of Whatever could do 4%. Or maybe they could vary it based on projected likely future earnings or some other factors. In any case, if the option was there, I'm sure many would take it. I would.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#46

Post by nmrm2 » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #43

nmrm2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would as many people pay the substantial cost of college merely for the "life enrichment". "Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday. And there's also real value in the ability to polish a piece of writing (for technical people)…

>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday. So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college? Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading.…

Of course. In another thread I called this the Einstein fallacy, and in pervades discussions of higher education in the US.

It's far more likely that you'll know what you don't know (and how to learn it) if you invest two years of time learning enough about other fields to know where you need to consult an expert.

(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying? I'm willing to bet many of those people both had college degrees and also "wasted" a hell of a lot more VC capital than the cost of a degree. College is not a panacea for unknown unknowns (it's not a panacea for anything), but those are illustrative examples of how not knowing something can cost a tremendous amount of money and opportunity.)

edit re your edit: I don't think the value of depth in a technical area is really up for debate (except for maybe in CS where some people seem to think there's nothing more to software engineering than low-throughput CRUD apps). Even the article concedes that point. The question is whether the rest of college is useful. We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#47

Post by greenyoda » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #29

randomdata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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…

"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. ... Fortunately, university courses have midterms and finals that do exactly this."

But solving problems that nobody has solved before is the kind of job that's usually filled by senior developers, not by recent graduates. By the time you have 5-10 years of work experience, the things you learned during your working career probably play a much more important role than the stuff you learned in college. If I've spent the last ten years actually designing distributed systems, why does it matter whether I've gone to college or not?

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#48

Post by randomdata » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #29

randomdata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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…

If you are able to trivially weed out those who do not have a CS degree, and having a CS degree carries with it the necessary skills to do an previously unattempted processing task, then doesn't the former naturally solve the latter?

The author does not seem to have a problem with testing for the presence of skills, like your algorithm question, but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#49

Post by SilasX » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

nmrm2 wrote: post #46

SilasX wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Life enrichment" isn't (just) an ends unto itself. Coming to terms with the magnitude of one's own ignorance is well worth a year or two of sunk opportunity cost. Read through the failed startup post-mortems posted here yesterday. So then it is possible to learn about your ignorance without college? Edit: more broadly, I don't think it's wrong to say "college teaches you what you don't know!", but it is misleading.…

Of course. In another thread I called this the Einstein fallacy, and in pervades discussions of higher education in the US. It's far more likely that you'll know what you don't know (and how to learn it) if you invest two years of time learning enough about other fields to know where you need to consult an expert. (as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying? I'm willing t…

>(as an aside, the portion of my post you quoted has nothing to do with what you're saying

It was a case of people learning unknown unknowns outside of college.

>We'll agree to disagree on studying fields in which you don't have expertise being a good mechanism for learning when you're over your head.

I didn't say that it's a bad mechanism, just that it's not especially better than the kind of learning your pick up in life normally (eg the startups you cited), without blowing $50k in opportunity costs per year.

Re: Against Tulip Subsidies

#50

Post by nmrm2 » Sat, Jun 06, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #48

nmrm2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you are able to trivially weed out those who do not have a CS degree, and having a CS degree carries with it the necessary skills to do an previously unattempted processing task, then doesn't the former naturally solve the latter? The author does not seem to have a problem with testing for the presence of skills, like your algorithm question, but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on thei…

> but making an assumption that someone does not have skills based on their race, gender, sexual preference, or credentials is where he takes issue.

This is answered entirely in my original post. Adequately testing for the presence of skills might take weeks or months of testing, which is a prohibitive cost. Fortunately, a huge portion of the potential employees I have to interview already took those tests throughout their coursework, and I can pretty well trust the quality of the tests they took based on the institution they went to (unlike SAT/credential/GRE-style tests, which are too easy to game). Why should I blow thousands of dollars in my time testing the others? How is that fair to me? And why would I assume someone who never took a math course after highschool is going to be able to work on my linear-algebra-heavy software library?

Also, lopping university degrees and other credentials into a list of protected classes is insulting. A degree is something that is earned and requires time and effort on the part of the student. It's expensive sometimes, but it's also a lot of work (assuming it's a good university)