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

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

#151

Post by slowmovintarget » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:19 PM UTC

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…

The only outcome the article focuses on is employment. Collectively, we used to know that a well-educated populous led to a better society. This applies doubly so for a representative democracy, where making informed choices leads directly to better policy.

Training of the mind also allows the educated to penetrate deceptions, deliberately muddled claims, and contradictions. But that result seems so uncommon these days.

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

#152

Post by mythrwy » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

moorhosj wrote: post #141

treis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Would you go to a doctor that learned medicine form YouTube? That's not a fair comparison. A better question would be: "Would you go to a Doctor that spent 9 years learning on the job or 9 years in school?"

I certainly wouldn’t want a doctor in their first 5 years of on-the-job training.

If they were overseen by another doctor with more experience it might be OK.

Besides I'd assume with this setup the future doctor wouldn't start with brain surgery. Maybe stitch up cuts and set broken bones, working up into more complicated scenarios.

I mean, I've always done my own minor doctoring anyway. And people did for a long time, it's only recently a long stint in college was required.

Granted this approach had variable levels of success, but the idea you have to have formal schooling to fix up any health problems I'm not sure I buy.

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

#153

Post by daveFNbuck » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

hopler wrote: post #131

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 writin…

College doesn't teach those soft skills. Jobs and skill training teach those skills You don't need college to write years of bad code. Internships or hobby projects do fine.

Hobby projects don't do fine because there's no one to tell you what you're doing wrong. You need that to avoid reinforcing bad habits.

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

#154

Post by gist » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is not. He is a professor at George Mason University.

The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that:

> 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,

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

#155

Post by subjectsigma » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

Because this is Hacker News, let's stick with technology: have none of you guys ever experienced the power gap? Seriously?

I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading shitty PowerPoints about how one might do that. The lower tier group? I was still helping them with their homework, which was basically sorting algorithms. One of them barely understood classes, and one of them was still struggling with properly constructing for loops after years of education. All of us paid absurd amounts of money to be where we were.

The Ivy guys were also well-off and came from good homes; that just means that money begets power begets money, not that their degrees were worthless paper. It makes sense that a professor of economics would write tripe like this, maybe it applies in his field but not here.

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

#156

Post by Mbioguy » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 3:43 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…

Boy are you in for a surprise. Medical school lectures are mostly optional these days and are entirely skipped by a significant proportion of med students in favor of resources like Strong Medicine (literally a YouTube channel), gigantic Anki digital flashcard decks (see reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki), UWorld, First Aid, Sketchy, Pathoma, etc. 'High Yield' is the buzzword for resources that are a better use of time. So yes, you almost certainly will trust a doctor someday who was educated at least in part by YouTube or comparable online resources. You just won't know it, since the paper on the wall will say "University of X". And as long as they pass the boards and make it through residency, does it matter?

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

#157

Post by jdietrich » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 4:07 PM UTC

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #117

jdietrich wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 writin…

>I've worked with people with previous job experience that have gone through 10-week coding programs. And it shows.

Were they useless? Were they worse than useless? Or were they just not as good as a more experienced developer?

I'm not arguing that college has no value, but that it's bad value for money. If someone can become a useful-but-flawed developer after a short bootcamp, surely it's better for them to learn on the job while earning a living rather than mortgage their future on four years of education.

If college were free to the student and cheap for society, sure, send everyone and don't worry about it. That's not the case though - an entire generation have been saddled with vast, unmanageable levels of student debt. We need to be asking serious questions about how much and what kind of education is really necessary to produce skilled workers.

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

#158

Post by identity-haver » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

Ken_Adler wrote: post #56

Crazy story: my son actually did what the author suggested, he talked his way into a free education at Princeton!!! He audited all the classes he wanted to... no diploma, but what a great experience (and a great story....) From the article: Ponder this: 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…

You definitely can't audit chemistry & engineering labs, architecture studio, geology field camp, etc. It seems that the more you can get the education by auditing, the more "signaling" the education is.

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

#159

Post by daenz » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 4:17 PM UTC

subjectsigma wrote: post #155

Because this is Hacker News, let's stick with technology: have none of you guys ever experienced the power gap? Seriously? I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading s…

I've had this conversation with a coworker who was frustrated that people with wealth could leverage that wealth to create more opportunities for themselves. My response is essentially: "isn't that what you want to do for yourself?" He seems to think it is more fair if someone with less wealth got access to those opportunities, instead of the people with wealth. How is that more fair? Why does it matter who gets the opportunities, as long as they're going to people with a low risk of wasting them?

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

#160

Post by ozim » Sat, Mar 16, 2019, 4:33 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…

I don't live in UK by what I heard from people that are there was "GP was googling stuff, when I visited".

There is also other side of coin, doctors who are really experienced in some area are going to be expensive. There is also a lot of people who you can treat by googling stuff. Of course they should not take pills without second hand opinion, but not everyone needs brain surgery. If you get viral infection or bacterial infection you have to send stuff to lab, and lab returns results in readable way, so even GP (general practitioner) is not needed. Once I even got my blood tests and "GP" (my first contact doctor since I am not in UK) was like: "yeah I dunno, I usually get older folks with those specific problems so I cannot really help you". Boy that was nice, because you can go to some ass who thinks he has to know everything and that would be annoying.

Be humble, even as developer you don't get to know everything. Don't think doctors, mechanical engineers know all.