

Universities and Economic Growth - nopinsight
http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth

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yardie
Not really sure what to make of the article. Some anecdotal evidence of some
book smart but not people smart interns. And attacking the very purpose of a
university education. The author romanticizes the work office far too much.
And while most people go to university to get a cushy office job some things
(education) will never make sense in the office.

I've gone to company trainings and the curriculum and atmosphere is more like
the university lecture hall than an office. Could you imagine sitting at your
desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest programming language ever? His idea
of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher education.

Highschools are great for this type of thing. The bar is particularly low. And
once you've met it you never have to go back again. Colleges aren't designed
that way. You go because you are looking for a detailed answer. And you are
capable of understanding the answer.

And I know for a fact that professors have no qualms about F's.

~~~
nopinsight
> Could you imagine sitting at your desk watching a powerpoint on the greatest
> programming language ever?

I agree watching Powerpoint will be boring, but it is simply a supplement to
real learning in his proposed system--working on projects. Also, you can skip
unedifying parts, unlike with live lectures.

> His idea of the university is more like a degree mill than a place of higher
> education.

Not really. The current system seems more like a degree mill than his. When
you can get A's and B's in many courses just by reading a few nights before
exam time, _that_ is a waste of four years. If you need to work on challenging
projects while learning theory to make them work, you'll definitely learn more
than just taking exams and quizzes (with occasional exercises).

~~~
yardie
I agree the low level courses aren't very interesting. But when you are
teaching to a class of thousands there really isn't a better method. Project
based work only works when the students are interested and can be engaged.
This is what I was told the 100 levels were about anyway. Weeding out those
that don't take the material serious from the ones that do. And it's very rare
I've had a lecture that I couldn't skip. The professor posted the lecture
online including pdfs and podcasts. Unedifying is highly subjective. A
particular part of the material that might seem easy to you could be difficult
for someone else. But cancelling the lecture all together won't be a solution.

>>

I assume this depends on the subject and the teacher. Courses that I thought
were going to be easy (Intro to Art History for example) turned out to
demanding than they let you believe. Maybe things have gotten worse since I
was in college (even though SAT scores keep going up). When I left highschool
projects and labs had to be dropped due to budget constraints. (School
couldn't afford the glass nor the insurance from what I heard). When I arrived
at uni, a technical uni, collaborative, project assignments were a major
component. The midterm and final were used to pad out your grade. I.E. if you
had strong project grades and 1 bad exam grade it couldn't be used against
you. And I've heard of students only showing up for only the midterm and
final, but I doubt you could get away with it for engineering or the sciences.

------
maurycy
Excellent article.

Embarrassing deconstruction of Robert Shiller's lecture; few awesome findings,
such as:

"Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a
television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and video
games. The students who get the most out of their four years in college are
not those who are most able, but rather those with the best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite the
potential savings in having each employee work from home. Companies spend a
fortune in commercial office space rent to create an environment with limited
distractions and keep workers there for most of each day."

Highly recommended reading.

~~~
diN0bot
corporate work spaces always bothered me this way. i don't have any trouble
focusing and working on stuff. in fact, i only started using hacker news
(let's face it, it's procrastination) when i started working at a company
after college.

it drained my moral to see others goofying off at work, and to feel my own
self tired at, say, 3, but hanging around until 5 just to blend in. you can
bet when i got home i didn't want to work, whereas when i contract or work on
my own projects i'll happily go play tennis at 3 and then work in the evening
once i've settled down.

------
btilly
I stopped reading at _Someone who had just finished read A Farewell to Alms
would respond "If American workers aren't better educated than they were in
the 1970s, why would you expect their wages to rise?"_ (He hyperlinked A
Farewell to Alms, which is a book he wrote.)

Whether or not American workers are better educated than they were in the
1970s, economists claim that productivity has been rapidly growing over the
last few decades. Growth in productivity is direct evidence of room for
compensation to grow as well. Therefore if wages haven't grown we need to look
elsewhere than "the workers aren't good enough to justify higher wages" for an
explanation.

The fact that he doesn't know basic economic facts about productivity and
wages is enough that I have no interest in listening to his explanations of
how to improve wages by making workers more productive.

I don't pretend to have anything like a full explanation for why productivity
and wages are not more strongly correlated. But it is worth noting that during
the last boom wages remained steady but money spent by employers on workers
grew at a healthy pace. Unfortunately the growth in spending mostly got sucked
up by higher health care premiums, so wages remained flat.

Unless you can fix economic trends like that one, I guarantee that the
correlation between wages and productivity will remain weak.

~~~
weaksauce
I am trying to find the connection with Philip Greenspun and Gregory Clark who
wrote the book in question. Are they the same person and Gregory is his pen
name?

~~~
barry-cotter
No connection.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Clark_%28economist%29>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun>

------
pragmatic
Is it the problem that school teaches how to follow directions instead of
think for ourselves? What does most of school consist of, even at the college
level? Following directions. Make sure you paper is exactly 20 pages long, get
the right answers to the even number math questions in the book.

Not until you emerge in the real world at age 22, do you finally get a chance
to think for yourself. You lack street smarts but a lot of (questionably)
valuable information on Political Science, Western Civilization, Algorithms,
Data Structures and Cobol.

Most of my liberal arts education could be picked up (much cheaper) with a
library card or a Kindle.

I think internships and apprenticing are a much better option.

How much did my computer science/economics/poli-sci education help me in the
real world as a programmer/software developer? Not much.

On the job I Learned how to research and experiment on my own, while
questioning everything (while being allowed to, without some crusty know it
all prof shutting your down). Corporate culture is actually a little better
for pushing the boundaries than academia.

~~~
AlisdairO
Funny. There's a whole load of code out there that could've done with being
created by someone who'd taken a data structures and algorithms class or two.
I wouldn't exactly classify that as questionably valuable.

And, really, I don't understand university education being classified as
following directions. It's far more self directed than earlier education, and
indeed the jobs that follow education - unless my experience was massively
atypical.

------
araneae
_A student who has learned nothing will not receive an F because the professor
doesn't want to admit that his teaching hasn't been compelling and/or
effective._

That's not true. Professors would love to fail more students. But if you do,
then you tons and tons of complaints, the university gets on your ass, and
then you have to go back and change a few Fs to Ds. It's not worth the
headache.

~~~
catzaa
The biggest lesson I have learned was that if you fail people, you should make
sure that those who fail correctly reflects the demographics (e.g. black
people, women). Otherwise it is a fuck-up with some very nasty complaints.

~~~
araneae
And the problem is that at the university I teach at, being an ethnic minority
is worth 20 pts of the 100 pts necessary for admission; the same number of
points as a full grade point average. That means that the black students did a
full grade point worse in high school, on average, than the white students
they're competing with. I fudge this by grading my black students easier than
my white students on essays/exams.

(based on the assumption that they score the same in other areas. That
assumption is obviously not true, but the other areas where they might differ
have such small point values it's close enough.)

~~~
gaius
Wait, so you compensate for group X getting in more easily by giving them an
easier ride too? Is that not backwards?

I think whoever you work for ought to invest in some sort of double-blind
marking system...

~~~
araneae
Why would they want a double-blind marking system?

It looks bad if you admit a bunch of black students and then fail a large
number of them.

------
nagrom
I've read several articles like this lately, and they've all ignored the
elephant in the room, which is this:

Professors hate teaching.

The best-respected professors in a university manage large research projects,
occasionally doing some research themselves. No-one becomes a professor to
teach - if they wanted to teach, they'd have left after their degree and gone
to a high school. The way that we select professors works to further this -
no-one got tenure at a 'good' university without a strong research record. And
since the competition is so fierce, research becomes your only focus.

It may be the case that smaller universities, or less-prestigious colleges,
can give tenure to university-teachers. But as far as I can see within the
system, teaching is considered a second-rate activity for second-rate minds.
Given that, no professor who is considered excellent will try very hard to
teach, and students' education will suffer.

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Tichy
"a genetic personal tendency towards future-mindedness"

That explanation seems very weak. And what about the difference in
productivity between English and American weavers - also genetic? That seems
very unlikely. Or maybe some other factor besides having access to the same
kind of machines... Perhaps something was killing the motivation of the less
productive workers (ie working harder might not have paid off for them).

------
gsastry
Blah blah blah... he can harp on the lecture system all he wants, but at the
end of the day you need a couple things for "success": 1) a motivated student,
2) an interested, accessible instructor.

