Universities should be more than toll gates • Hacker News Board

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#81

Post by dgfitz » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 1:53 PM UTC

Planktonne wrote: post #65

> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance. This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming ev…

> University has no value beyond credentialism

Could have stopped there.

Nothing, absolutely nothing I learned at university was because of the university. What I did learn was that the whole thing was a crock of shit when I had to buy the same book 3 times for calc 1/2/3 because each semester the author, who also taught the class and used the same book for all 3 topics, put out a new version with different problem sets each semester. Gulick or gulic was her name. Her husband also taught there. I think they were in cahoots.

I guess I did learn something: it was a crock of shit.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#82

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

fzwang wrote: post #70

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #43

Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines. The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model…

I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability mach…

[deleted]

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#83

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 1:55 PM UTC

From my experience at a German university, it was very clear that every student with a desire to learn would learn relevant skills and have no trouble passing any exam. The exams never were easy and studying was required,but if you understood the subject you would definitely pass.

The experience the author describes seems totally disconnected what I have ever experienced in university. The author believes (which I think is unlikely) that the university had nothing to teach to him, in my experience this always was the fault of the student. Often blaming "esoteric" and "irrelevant" subjects such as linear algebra for their lack of success, while not understanding that it is a vital course for any engineer.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#84

Post by constantcrying » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 1:59 PM UTC

artemonster wrote: post #15

I get my blood pressure to dangerous levels each time I stumble upon some high quality video lectures on youtube that explain some topics that were totally fucked in university, like PID control. 30 Minute video made by some amateur with cool animations explains basically 95% of everything you need to know vs old lifeless dork professor at "elite" university mumbling some nonsense and throwing walls of formulas with…

My experience is the opposite. The 30 Minute videos often give a very hollow outline of a subject, but fail to integrate it into any context. Almost always the formulas are more useful than the false intuitions you get from fancy animations.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#85

Post by bilbo0s » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #77

fzwang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability mach…

You are correct, but the fact that employers are being rational doesn't make them blameless. To answer your question is that I don't see any employers decoupling from credentialism because why would they? So I think any solution to that would require there has to be a cost associated with university requirements for job positions. A fee maybe? Unless the job legally requires the credential (e.g. engineer, lawyer, nur…

But this is just a tacit admission that a lot of jobs need the credential.

And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.

Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#86

Post by arn3n » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

I am always astonished by the range of people who claim their college degree was useless, citing rote memorization and bad classes. I had an entirely different experience and so did most people I know. University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours, to discuss ideas with my peers and have them either validated or critiqued by experts. Sure, all the information is available online (which is a miracle into itself) but without frequent contact with professors and mentors I wouldn’t have even known where to look or what existed in the field. University, for me, was a place where I was apprenticing full-time under highly experienced people, surrounded by people my age who also were doing the same. Years of self-teaching didn’t get me anywhere close to what a few semesters of expert mentorship got me. I never felt I had to memorize anything: exams consisted of system design or long programming projects or optimization challenges. I loved it, and I’m not sure if people went to different universities or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#87

Post by fl0id » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #43

Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines. The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model…

To blame are employers but also politicians and Uni admin staff enabling the narrative that a degree should always be about employable skills. First employers often eintreten know what they need and in general this focus on practice is exactly what promotes roteness imo

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#88

Post by Planktonne » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

thunky wrote: post #69

Planktonne wrote: post #65

> Absolute joy turned into anger, and anger into resentment, as I wondered how different my life might have been if I’d been taught subjects I actually cared about by professors who cared too. Then I caught myself, realizing I was being melodramatic about a decade-old grievance. This is incredibly self-indulgent. You were given opportunities you refused to engage with and are now continuing that pattern by blaming ev…

> You were given opportunities you refused to engage with That's not what I read at all. They went to a good university and got good grades. They did what they were supposed to do. Then they later realized how little of value the actual education was. The university missed an opportunity to educate them, not the other way around. The student is not responsible for having a bad teacher.

They got good grades by panic cramming the night before exams. I've had lots of students like that (I've even been a student like that) and in every case one thing is true: they would have accomplished more with less effort if they'd focused on learning to understand rather than trying to treat everything as a memorisation task.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#89

Post by fzwang » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #77

fzwang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability mach…

You are correct, but the fact that employers are being rational doesn't make them blameless. To answer your question is that I don't see any employers decoupling from credentialism because why would they? So I think any solution to that would require there has to be a cost associated with university requirements for job positions. A fee maybe? Unless the job legally requires the credential (e.g. engineer, lawyer, nur…

It's an interesting conundrum, where everyone knows the system is bs but no one wants to take the first step. Hypothetically, some possible scenarios:

1) An external event, like a war, that stress test the credentials and to force selection based on outcomes. 2) Some sort of monetary benefit for employers, like extended internships for high schoolers. Assuming it's cheaper/more effective for an employer to train their workforce from scratch than pay the full salary of a recent grad. 3) A new field, where credentials haven't been established yet.

There are obv caveats to all of these. And they don't address the question of what a formal education is supposed to accomplish. At some point, it was supposed to be to train "better citizens". And that shouldn't be dictated by employers, imo. But nowadays it seems like the purpose is to get a job and survive.

Re: Universities should be more than toll gates

#90

Post by fl0id » Sun, Sep 21, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

orwin wrote: post #68

tgv wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US perhaps, but it happened in Western Europe too, even where there weren't student loans. Simplistic explanation: the right wing parties were in favor of "austerity" measures, i.e. budget cuts, and the left-wing ones of getting as many people through college as possible. Unfortunately, both got what they wished for.

On this particular issue, i think all parties that reach power want the same thing: more educated people, cheaper (because let's be honest, a "left-wing" party in Europe that conquer power in Europe is at most a "third way"-type party, sometime with a green tint), and are all equally at fault for the situation. The meaningfull difference between right-wing and left-wing parties is how the University should be organiz…

LOL no. Here right wingers just want to defund higher ed and control what they do. None of which will help with quality of output. (and those rankings are largely useless anyway) they don’t want more educated ppl, because they blame education for what they see wrong with society and would undermine their base. (Like how there’s claims that unis make people leftist or similar )