Surprising Things About School • Hacker News Board

Re: Surprising Things About School

#31

Post by nickthemagicman » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

>The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant.

Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate.

Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable.

Suffice to say your statement is not accurate. Education shows massive economic value.

However, EVEN if it didn't show massive economic value, exposing young people to a variety of ideas and perspectives before they enter the work world gives them a solid foundation to make decisions and critically think about life is massive value in itself.

Human beings are limited by the information in their heads and don't typically seek out new information voluntarily. Education gives them new information to reason about the world with.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#32

Post by austenallred » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:37 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I kno…

For me it was the reverse. Parents that grew up poor and saw college as the way out but didn’t understand dynamics beyond that, so it was, “Go to the best (most expensive) college you can, study anything at all, and you’ve got it made” which is either OK advice or terrible advice depending on what college that is and what you happen to study.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#33

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:39 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #9

peterwwillis wrote: post #6

Some other surprising things about school: - parents care more about extracurricular and athletic pursuits than academic. They'll help their kids play a sport, but rather than try to help their children learn, they'll complain that the teachers are not doing their jobs - children react to changes in environment the same way adults do, but this isn't considered by schools because they know the students have no choice…

I can help my children to learn sport and I can help them learn math. I can not help them learn subjects I have long forgotten or was never good at in the first place. I dont expect teachers to teach my kids sport, I do expect them to teach math and history. Not sure what is wrong with that.

I think what's wrong with that is assuming teachers even can teach your child things that even you weren't good at or can't even remember. Parents seem to think teachers can do things they can't do. But they're not magicians. They're normal adults with textbooks. Many times they're not even experienced in the subjects they're teaching.

Teachers have to teach 30 kids at a time, who all have different backgrounds and lives. They can't possibly give them all enough individual attention and time. And somehow they're supposed to get them all to surpass all the factors holding back each specific kid in a myriad of ways, to succeed at the same material, at the same time, at the same pace.

They have to be babysitters, disciplinarians, counselors, role models, and educators. And then they get yelled at by parents or lectured by administrators for not keeping up to this standard. It's crazy. It's one of the reasons so many teachers quit within five years. It's one of the reasons it's so hard to find good teachers. And of course, they never pay them accordingly.

If it weren't for the fact that teachers are idealistic and want to help children learn, we'd have a nation of morons, because only desperate people would subject themselves to this career.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#34

Post by randomdata » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

nickthemagicman wrote: post #31

randomdata wrote: post #12

> Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates I don't see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for "just in time" learning. If you run into a problem at work you're not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the…

>The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate. Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates ar…

> Your numbers are out of proportion with every single statistic that measures salary of a college graduate vs salary of a high school graduate.

The original article gives the $10k figure and a quick Google search suggests other sources agree with it. But really, the exact figure is irrelevant. The fatal flaws with that way of measuring income remain. The numbers don't really matter here.

> Maybe incomes have remained stagnant because the overall income is dropping nationwide and college graduates are the ones keeping the average stable.

I don't think the data supports this. Incomes are stagnant for even the lowest income group. Unless you are suggesting that college graduates in the lowest income group are responsible for keeping that lowest income group afloat? If that is the case, what should we take from that? Why are college graduates in the lowest income group in the first place if college attainment leads to higher incomes?

Re: Surprising Things About School

#35

Post by kbutler » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #24

VLM wrote: post #16

The failure of MOOCs #10 is a failure of metric measurement. In the old days if you wanted to learn something, often you'd pay $20 to $50 for a book. For example, Amazon order search claims that somewhere I have a copy of "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming" by Norvig, which is supposed to be a decent book in the field, cool. Ironically maybe that IS the textbook for the famous AI MOOC class, I don't kn…

OP here (shocked to see this on HN): The context is missing but is important. When I say MOOCs have failed I mean something very specific: asynchronous online learning has proven to be so dramatically less effective than synchronous, guided learning. Better than nothing existing, but we’re learning that only a small subset of people are able to effectively learn from them. In other words, take a random sample of 100…

How are you measuring the same level of motivation?

From my anecdotal experience, the people taking the "live, guided course" have committed to:

  - synchronous attendance at a particular time, probably at a particular place
  - probably a dollar investment
  - face-to-face contact with instructor
  - near-traditional learning environment

People taking a MOOC have committed to:

  - browsing on an electronic device

There's generally a really high barrier to entry to the synchronous, guided learning, so it seems like comparing students who have paid tuition and enrolled in a class vs prospective students expressing interest on a university recruitment page.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#36

Post by austenallred » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

kthejoker2 wrote: post #30

icebraining wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.

The school should partner with one of those "we invest in you in return for 1% of your life earnings" hedge funds. That way it'd have easy access to short-term capital needs like this.

OP here. We are a school that is completely free and takes a percentage of income (though for two years, not for life). Even still the $400 to make it through the last month was a barrier.

We’re working on having a fund available for living expenses, but “I’m going to pay you cash so you can go to school” is a different risk profile than “This School is free until you’re hired.”

Re: Surprising Things About School

#37

Post by faitswulff » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

austenallred wrote: post #32

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I kno…

For me it was the reverse. Parents that grew up poor and saw college as the way out but didn’t understand dynamics beyond that, so it was, “Go to the best (most expensive) college you can, study anything at all, and you’ve got it made” which is either OK advice or terrible advice depending on what college that is and what you happen to study.

I got similar advice from my parents and followed it, somewhat bitterly. My dad regrets dropping out of college, but he also paid $400/semester for tuition, not $20,000 like I did. I feel like "any degree == $$$" was much more true in the 70s and 80s than it was when I graduated.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#38

Post by rc-1140 » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I kno…

> Searching for relevant mentorship is a very very hard problem.

I completely agree. As someone just reaching a bit over 3 years out of a bachelor's program, I had no one that I could talk to for a solid 20 years of my life about computers, let alone what I wanted to do. Like a bunch of people here, computers were my "thing" but no one around me seemed to take much interest in them. When it came time to go through the college hunt in high school, my mother had no idea what to tell me since although she had a background in math, she worked as a lab tech, social worker, and teacher. I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email. I didn't even know it was POSSIBLE to get a degree in computer science until community college, and later interacting with people I met from video game communities. I still couldn't actually get my bachelor's in computer science for financial reasons (have a LibArts BA), and even with knowing about CS as a path, I didn't have anyone who could help me or even just talk to about what to do. Professors at my university didn't know what to do with me, and the university career center tried to shove me into roles like inner-city teacher, advertising, and camp counselor.

It wasn't until two years ago that I became good friends with someone who had been through a lot from his college to several jobs in industry, and he helped me get on track to doing something I wanted to do. Went from a dead-end job doing forced cowboy coding and data entry at a small insurance company to QA automation at a nice software company that works in the transport industry. Even now, I wouldn't really consider him my mentor because I know he's got a lot more work responsibility than I do and I don't like asking him questions that remind him of work, especially since he's my friend first. I firmly believe that if I had someone LIKE my friend as an actual mentor earlier in my life, I'd have been studying things I liked doing way earlier.

EDIT: Something that occured to me after I hit submit is that I still feel that I don't have an actual mentor, yet many articles/blogs and people I've spoken to insist that it's easy and almost natural to find and have one, be it at the workplace or somewhere else; any articles I've read or listened to (example of the latter being the Hello World Podcast) about people who have done it without mentors were people who grew up with computers/programming texts in the home. I'm still not sure if this is a reality or something that happens to maybe 5% of the programmer population.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#39

Post by austenallred » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:48 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #10

triplesec wrote: post #3

Pullout: "We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane."

It's self-contradictory - he did have somewhere to get it from :) I'm only half-joking; I think the problem here is lack of information. That the student was likely to move from $10/h to $70k/y is something that the teachers might know, but random lenders probably don't. On the other hand, I don't know if I want to see financial companies partnering with schools to provide loans - seems ripe for abuse.

Lenders aren’t very good at quantifying future changes in income. They’re trying, but it’s a hard problem to solve.

Re: Surprising Things About School

#40

Post by edraferi » Mon, Mar 12, 2018, 1:49 PM UTC

golergka wrote: post #19

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #15

"17. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice" This one certainly hits me hard. With a mother who dropped out of university and a father who didn't go myself and my sister both have good degrees (she's a newly qualified Vet and I'm a startup's birth and death out of uni), and nowhere to get decent advice. I kno…

Same here, only the opposite way. Anyone in my family have had degrees for at least 3 generations (majority had 2 degrees in different fields, and some pursued academic careers as well). Dropping out of university to do what I love is still something I feel guilty about - even 10 years later, being pretty much successful in the field I chose, I still feel like I'm a failure just because I don't have this damn piece o…

You can always get the paper later -- they are for sale. The main issue is just deciding to spend the time they demand.

Go to school when you feel you need something they can teach you, and not before.