School is all about signaling, not skill-building • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by analog31 » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

In my view, school does not admit to a singular purpose, even if a number of people seem to achieve similar results from it. Instead, different students can pursue different strategies through school, and get different things out of it. Even if signaling is a benefit of school, it doesn't need to be the only benefit.

School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually are.

Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack. Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a pitfall of school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.

In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids, along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.

The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack school to your advantage?"

Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or make even worse hacks emerge.

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

#112

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:34 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #109

dogma1138 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doct…

> The essential question is "why do we think that every skilled job requires a four-year college degree?".

That’s not accurate. Law school requires any degree followed by three years of a law degree. Now that’s pure signalling. Every other Anglophone country bar Canada has undergraduate law degrees instead of requiring what amount to two undergraduate degrees.

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

#113

Post by mattkrause » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:39 PM UTC

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…

As a student in the US, I got a ton of feedback on assignments.

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

#114

Post by herostratus101 » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:48 PM UTC

Caplan's been beating this drum for years. Pretty telling that he doesn't touch on engineering or any real disciplines in his article. It's possible for someone extremely self-motivated to teach themselves some of those subjects, but you won't learn them by sitting through lectures.

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

#115

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

tokyodude wrote: post #104

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…

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 co…

> 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.

... among the population who have been hired to do the job. This is conditioning on the collider. The people without a degree who got in are a highly selected sample compared to all people without degrees. Anyone who used this to argue that a degree wasn’t a strong useful signal Wouk be making the same mistake as those trying to get rid of the GRE in graduate admissions because in the population admitted the GRE doesn’t predict anything. If it did that would show under or overweighting ofbthe signal it sends. Zero correlation shows it has been given appropriate weight.

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

#116

Post by bko » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 12:54 PM UTC

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…

> Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube?

Depends on my ailment. Most of the time people go to the doctor they are told to get some rest and maybe prescribed something. I don't think that needs 8 years of medical school. And doctor's don't even necessarily do a good job at prescriptions either, since they tend to over-prescribe in the US

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

#117

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:00 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #109

dogma1138 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doct…

Because most high school graduates don't have the soft skills (or the hard skills) to work in a corporate environment.

I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows. They might've been taught a framework or a language, but their computer science skills aren't nearly as developed. Some things take years to click, and growth occurs from years of writing bad code.

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

#118

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:02 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #101

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.

If nobody from my school could do the job, those connections would dry up and the companies would higher and fill internship positions from elsewhere.

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

#119

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

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 point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received.

Ability. You’re talking about ability. Caplan estimates that on average the return from education is ~70% signalling and ability, 30% changes in human capital if I remember right.

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

#120

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

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…

> Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to review the necessary material.

Preach it. The same is true of past or specimen exam papers or textbook questions. Writing, like debating, exposes your own ignorance to you and allows you to remedy it.