Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel • Hacker News Board

Re: Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

#81

Post by Duff » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 1:31 AM UTC

aksbhat wrote: post #51

mmaunder wrote: post #38

Context: "Vivek Wadhwa is .. a Faculty and Advisor, Singularity University, Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University." Wadhwa is a beneficiary of the college fees he is advoc…

Harvard affiliates? There are no Harvard affiliates but there are higher education affiliates, which are called as universities. Harvard itself is one such affiliate in some sense. Universities are a result of Theory of The Firm, since a university is generally restricted to small geographic region, it can decrease the transaction costs between the various components of higher education. However if you franchise a un…

Rapacious universities are testing the theory of creating affiliates in pursuit of more money. NYU, Cornell, Texas A&M, and Carnegie-Mellon are opening up campuses in the UAE to pull in some more money.

Re: Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

#82

Post by quanticle » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 2:54 AM UTC

dpatru wrote: post #65

hristov wrote: post #19

The dean of the Stanford engineering school has a very good point. Peter Thiel's dropout scholarhips are very much a rigged experiment. First he is going to select the brightest kids in the best schools. These kids already have higher than usual chance of success. Then he is going to give them 100k each. That will also increase their chances of success. Then he is going help them with advice and networking as much as…

> Thus, as a social experiment Peter Thiel's dropout scholarships are worthless. They do not show anything unless Mr. Thiel creates a control group by investing in kids that do stay in school or investing in kids that just graduated college. There already exists a control group: the class of students starting elite schools in 2011. The question Thiel is asking is: What would happen to an exceptional kid who, instead…

The only problem is that the kids who are excluded from Mr. Thiel's group aren't being treated the same. No one is showering them with a hundred grand of startup capital and advice from the best in the business. They're out there on their own. Maybe they get help from their parents, but that's hardly the same level of assistance as a $100k grant and advice from industry leaders.

Re: Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

#83

Post by Cushman » Wed, Apr 13, 2011, 3:15 AM UTC

hristov wrote: post #19

The dean of the Stanford engineering school has a very good point. Peter Thiel's dropout scholarhips are very much a rigged experiment. First he is going to select the brightest kids in the best schools. These kids already have higher than usual chance of success. Then he is going to give them 100k each. That will also increase their chances of success. Then he is going help them with advice and networking as much as…

I was a gifted student who dropped out of high school to go to college early. I was awarded scholarships totaling around $70,000 and borrowed roughly the same amount of money to attend one of the ludicrously expensive private colleges you hear so much about.

Now, I loved college, and it certainly did a lot for me. But would I be better off today if someone had offered me the same money on the same terms to start my own business? Almost certainly.

Re: Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

#84

Post by ekiru » Fri, Apr 15, 2011, 5:02 AM UTC

Taylorious wrote: post #73

The problems with higher education don’t solely rest on the universities; the consumers are equally to blame. I’m sick of people talking about going in dept 200k to get a bachelors degree. If you paid 40k or even 15k a year on liberal arts you’re a fool who deserves to be saddled with dept. Honestly, the liberal arts education the average student gets pales in comparison to what an intellectually curious person would…

> Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will.

Is this actually true? I don't attend Harvard, but I do attend a private university in the top 10 of the US News and World Reports rankings, and I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student (although some are taught by "lecturers". Some of the classes from the core curriculum are taught by grad students, but that's not actually necessarily a bad thing. Both of the grad students who have taught courses I've taken have been excellent teachers, which can be much more important for a teacher of introductory calculus or such.

Re: Friends Don’t Let Friends Take Education Advice From Peter Thiel

#85

Post by ekiru » Fri, Apr 15, 2011, 2:37 PM UTC

ekiru wrote: post #84

Taylorious wrote: post #73

The problems with higher education don’t solely rest on the universities; the consumers are equally to blame. I’m sick of people talking about going in dept 200k to get a bachelors degree. If you paid 40k or even 15k a year on liberal arts you’re a fool who deserves to be saddled with dept. Honestly, the liberal arts education the average student gets pales in comparison to what an intellectually curious person would…

> Sure Harvard may employ people who are titans in their field, Nobel Prize winners and the like, but unless you are going to Grad school there it won’t affect you any. They won’t be teaching you, TAs will. Is this actually true? I don't attend Harvard, but I do attend a private university in the top 10 of the US News and World Reports rankings, and I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student…

> I don't believe there is a single CS course taught by a grad student

Actually, this is incorrect. Although I'm not aware of any courses taught by grad students this year, I now recall that one of the lecturers also taught while a Ph.D. candidate. However, only a small minority of CS courses here seem to be taught by grad students.