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School is all about signaling, not skill-building

latimes.com

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Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#101

Post by buboard »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #23

Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…

> secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school

you don't get those in any school. your school's signaling secured that.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#103

Post by pbhjpbhj »

yorwba wrote: post #76
avcdsuia wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a US citizen, but AFAIK, a course includes lectures, office hours, assignments etc. How did he manage to fully understand the materials without all the resources that are provided only for registered students?

Also not a US citizen and I don't know how it works at Princeton, but in my experience, getting actionable feedback on assignments is rare. You may get told where your mistakes are, but not how you should have done it instead. Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to review the necessary material. As for office hours, I never went to any, but I assume that they're not going to chec…

At my UK uni (some time back) we had tutorials and "office hours". Tutorials would recap lecture material and have question/answer sessions, and set "homework" questions; and be optional. Office hours would give chance to talk with the professor, you just queued outside, or signed up for a time slot.

Tutorials were run by TAs recruited from the body of PhD students and so could be of mixed quality (my metaphysics tutor was better than the lecturer), but would at least have value in repitition.

Libraries were vital to me. As at the time were computer facilities (MathCAD, Maple, Excel, Fortran, etc.). For some of my courses there were laboratories (material science), and for Art History there were trips and a special picture library.

You could sit in the back of lectures back then, but I think they check your ID nowadays.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#104

Post by tokyodude »

ozim wrote: post #75
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #23

Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each). Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you a…

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…

Note: I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

The article is about the fact that school does not show that "developer ... is signaling that he is reliable and comes to work every day"

The whole point of the article is there is zero correlation between people who've graduated from college and people who haven't in term of how well they do on the job.

It sounds counter intuitive. There's like 3 situations

1. College trains you more than non-college

2. College doesn't train you but shows you're willing to stick things out more than people who didn't go

3. College does nothing what-so-ever (no difference in job performance from hiring people who did or didn't go to college)

The author of the article is claiming 100 years of research has shown it's #3. People will let you in the door because you have the paper (diploma) but they are fooling themselves that that paper has any meaning relative to hiring people without that paper

Here's another interview with the same author

http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-edu...

again, I am not agreeing nor disagreeing with the article. I'm only clarifying what it's trying to say

Let me add though, the author is claiming this is true in aggregate. Not for your personal anecdote.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#105

Post by exelius »

Zarath wrote: post #62

Come on, have we really swung so far on the "game is rigged" and "college isn't what it used to be" pendulum that we're acting like college doesn't build useful skills. Before college I had never written a program in my life outside of my TI-83. Coming out of college I was able to secure a full time job at a highly respected software company. They didn't hire me because my program was great (it wasn't that great), bu…

I had a philosophy degree and taught myself to code as a teenager. I was able to secure a full time job with a highly respected software company upon graduation, and they didn’t give a fuck what degree I had as long as I had one and could code.

I learned a lot in college, but I definitely didn’t learn any direct job skills. I just went to a big state school with a respected CS program (that I was not enrolled in) which drew a lot of companies to our career fair. I think that kind of shows the multiple layers of signaling involved here...

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#106

Post by pbhjpbhj »

lasagnaphil wrote: post #19
NoblePublius wrote: post #8

Admissions based on standardized test scores ONLY. Make colleges co-sign loans. Fixed it.

South Korea actually kinda does this (your university depends on one single test), and the results aren’t that pretty...

Can you expand on what you mean by "aren't that pretty"?

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#107

Post by icebraining »

rjf72 wrote: post #72
hooch wrote: post #16

“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that alm…

One key thing this paragraph misses is the characterization of this sort of person. Imagine we have a person that would independently, without extrinsic reward or 'push', show up to classes completely of their own accord. And we must further assume that they would engage in all assignments and somehow try to regularly test their understanding - the feedback exams offer is crucial to demonstrating understanding. And w…

> The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton

This doesn't explain why a dropout (or even just someone with an acceptance letter but who never joined) isn't worth as much in the labor market as someone who finished the degree.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#108

Post by icebraining »

kevintb wrote: post #70
BadassFractal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having gone to 2 of the top 5 US CS programs, I would have likely learned more about CS as an autodidact vs learning from researchers, barely speaking English, dragged kicking and screaming into doing lectures they visibly couldn't care less about. It did give me direct access to FAANG though, which was convenient and I wouldn't have gotten from some random community college. It goes back to credentialing and signali…

Perhaps for you; not for my experience. Also, you get as much as you put in. I’ve had plenty of awful professors but found ways to study in my own time, do my own projects and read papers on top of the curriculum I was learning. You can’t expect to passively receive the best possible education by top notch teachers, especially in research institutions. Lastly, your first sentence neatly proves my point that elite/“to…

> study in my own time, do my own projects and read papers

You mean, the stuff you can do without enrolling? Yeah, that's the point.

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#109

Post by jdietrich »

dogma1138 wrote: post #96
ozim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at what you wrote "I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships". That does not read like school did that for you and probably you could do the same without school. How much of that CS101 was studying on your own time? Finishing school is signaling that you are person that shows up in the morning for classes and puts up years of his life to do that. By any means I am hiring developer who is signal…

Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? I think the problem here is a bias due to the fact that the employment after earning their computer science degree is for many people not about the science part of it but rather about fairly mundane programming and general office work. Good luck arguing that chemistry, biology, mechanical engineering, medicine and many other fields that require specific too…

The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?". It would be a peculiar coincidence if the vast majority of jobs required exactly the same amount of academic education. Why do so many people go on to do work that has little or nothing to do with their major?

Here in the UK, a large proportion of healthcare is delivered by healthcare professionals other than doctors. If I go to my GP (family doctor) with a minor ailment, I'm likely to be treated by a Nurse Practitioner, who may have a Master's degree in nursing or may have never attended college at all. If I have a minor surgery, the surgery might be performed by a Surgical Care Practitioner working under the supervision of a consultant surgeon.

Lambda School have conclusively shown that it doesn't take four years to make someone into an employable software developer. How many other job skills could be taught through a short bootcamp programme, intensive vocational training or on-the-job training?

Re: School is all about signaling, not skill-building

#110

Post by viraptor »

hjk05 wrote: post #98
hooch wrote: post #16

“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that alm…

As an employer I would not care much if a new hire only had the skills of uni but not the diploma. But I’m lazy and there is no way I’m going to do what’s essentially 5 years worth of examination to ensure the candidate lives up to some self professed level of education. Especially not in a 100+ pile of applications from others who where vetted as they went by the university. It’s not “certification” over actual lear…

If someone's really motivated, there's also enough online courses which give certificates (MITx style) to collect almost the whole uni curriculum. Even with paying for that certificate, it's way cheaper than uni.
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