
Universities: excellence v equity - Futurebot
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646985-american-model-higher-education-spreading-it-good-producing-excellence
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roymurdock
> The more people have degrees, the more employers will insist on recruiting
> graduates. In many countries jobs such as teaching and nursing, which did
> not require a degree 30 years ago, are now reserved for graduates. When just
> a small elite went to university, plenty of decent jobs were available to
> those with only secondary schooling. That is no longer true.

This is the most interesting part of the education puzzle to me. There is
quite clearly an oversupply of people with degrees, both undergraduate and
post-graduate, but the harsh reality is that you still _need_ one due to
credentialism, the shrinking number of "low-hanging fruit" problems, and,
paradoxically, the increased supply of people with degrees.

One solution from a hiring perspective is a DaaS (Degree as a Service) model
such as HourlyNerd [1] or Gigster (YC15) [2] where you can hire well-pedigreed
business and CS graduates as micro consultants or coders.

But in the future the biggest change I expect to see is one in the hiring
attitude. As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many
to become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the
average graduate. I expect brand names to decrease in value as businesses and
decision makers increase prioritization on demonstrated ability (Github,
portfolio of work) and cost to hire, which will generally be lower for less
well-branded schools and alternative methods of education, such as
apprenticeships and online education.

That's just my gut feeling from personal observations. There's a good chance
I'm 100% wrong and getting a branded education will be more important than
ever due to the high number of candidates w/ degrees, and the increasing
importance of connections and network. That seems to be they way SV is moving
these days.

[1] [https://hourlynerd.com/](https://hourlynerd.com/)

[2] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-
developers/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/uber-for-developers/)

~~~
pc86
> _As more and more future managers go through college, I expect many to
> become more and more skeptical of the aptitude and capabilities of the
> average graduate._

We agree there, but doesn't the next sentence represent a fundamental shift in
thinking? I would think it much more likely for businesses and managers
(particularly HR) to simply shift their signalling from Bachelor's degrees to
Master's degrees rather than from Bachelor's degrees to a context-sensitive
review of your body of work. It's much easier to say "I have a Master's in CS
from Stanford" than it is to say "Here's my GitHub portfolio, let's talk about
a few of my projects."

I'd much rather folks focus on what they've actually accomplished rather than
the institution they happened to attend, but I don't see it happening,
particularly from HR folks who are not technically inclined and are simply
trying to get a pile of 500 resumes down to a dozen. And like you said with
SV, in elite circles you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a job ad
looking for someone from {Stanford|Harvard|MIT}.

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lumberjack
What a bunch of bollocks. There is no connection between countries trying to
improve their research facilities and the privitisation of undergraduate
education.

The latter is just more profitable and goes along with the trend to privitise
all state services which has been going on for a while.

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tokenadult
To help out readers who encounter a paywall (I didn't), I'll quote two key
paragraphs from the article kindly submitted here. First, not quite halfway
down in the article,

"What happened in America then happened in Europe and Japan in the 1960s and
1970s, in South Korea in the 1980s, and is now happening the world over.
Student numbers are growing faster than global GDP. So hungry is the world for
higher education that enrolment is growing faster than purchases of that
ultimate consumer good, the car (see chart 1). The global tertiary enrolment
ratio—the proportion of the respective age cohort enrolled in
university—increased from 14% to 32% in the two decades to 2012; the number of
countries with an enrolment ratio of more than half went up from five to 54
over the period. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only part of the world where
“massification” is not much in evidence yet."

So undergraduate higher education enrollment is becoming commonplace all over
the world. That, in turn, means that young people possessing an undergraduate
degree is now more and more commonplace, so the job market has begun regarding
postgraduate degrees more and more.

From farther along in the article,

"As first degrees become standard, more people are getting postgraduate
qualifications to stand out from the crowd. In both America and Britain, 14%
of the adult workforce have a postgraduate degree; and despite the increase in
supply, the postgraduate premium has increased in both America and Britain,
especially since 2000. There was a time, points out Stephen Machin, professor
of economics at University College London, when a postgraduate degree
depressed wages; but that was when maths PhDs worked mainly in academia, not
in the financial sector."

The article, by the way, is a "leader" (an editorial) leading into a special
report section in which _The Economist_ does more detailed reporting on the
role of higher education around the world and its societal effects. A crucial
question, which deserves more research, is to what degree attending higher
education institutions actually provides education, making young people
smarter and more capable, and to what degree it simply provides social
signaling, distinguishing one job-seeker seeker who had wealth and leisure
time to pursue a degree from another job-seeker who had fewer personal
resources. It is not clear yet that postsecondary education adds as much value
at the margins as primary education does. The clear development model contrast
between east Asia and Africa is instructive about this issue: at independence,
Zambia was more prosperous than Taiwan. Many African countries developed
national universities and attempted to provide higher education to local
elites as soon as they became independent. Many of the college graduates from
those countries then became part of the brain drain of emigration to the West.
Meanwhile, in east Asia the focus of national education policy was on broad
access to good-quality primary and secondary education, and industrialization
and transition to a post-industrial economy in those countries was built on a
base of broad masses of literate, numerate workers. And, as today's article
reports, in the end east Asia ended up with more young people in higher
education than in Africa anyhow, but along the way everyone became at least
minimally well educated. For the same number of dollars, it probably does a
country more good to improve primary education for the many than to broaden
access to higher education for the few.

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throwaway999888
While the authors are busy jerking themselves sore over American
Exceptionalism, I'm still as alienated by the rampant focus on academic
pedigree and class from Americans as I was when I first learned about it. In
my corner of the world, _most_ people have these considerations when they
choose the school-route (or not) in life:

\- Tired of reading and writing? Get an education in some trade.

\- Want a specific job that requires higher education? Continue school and get
good enough grades.

\- Don't know what you want to do? Choose one of the former based on your
perceived abilities and preferences.

While there is to a degree some academic inflation, as long as there are
people who are more inspired by doing hands-on work instead of becoming a
white collar worker, I think things will be OK. Oh, and not having a college
or university degree is not looked down upon. At all.

Only the no/low-skill jobs, with low pay, are actively avoided if people can
avoid them. So we have more of the poorer immigrants ending up with those
jobs.

~~~
umanwizard
I really don't think class and pedigree mattering is an American thing. I
suspect you made the common error of pointing out something good about one of
the ultra highly developed European countries, noticing that it's not the case
in the poorer and more unequal US, and inexplicably thinking the US is the
outlier.

Edit: just to expand on this, the problems with the US are a result of the
complicated system of cultural, political, and institutional issues. There
isn't a Dictator of America who can wake up tomorrow and decree that everyone
will believe in some set of enlightened values. So whenever I hear "I can't
believe Americans do/think/believe X, that's so silly!" from Europeans, I
can't help but think it's no more helpful than "isn't it quaint that Syrians
care so much about religion" or "why can't Jews and Palestineans just get
along?"

~~~
benbreen
The parent comment fails to rings true to me in the case of the three European
countries I have experience with, the UK, France, and Portugal. All three are
in many ways even more obsessed with class-based academic hierarchies. For
instance, students of Portugal's oldest university (Universidade de Lisboa)
regularly wear 18th century style robes and were almost universally considered
to be snobby rich kids by the Portuguese people I talked to about it. Oxbridge
and the ancient English public schools that feed into it (Eton, Harrow, etc)
are even more pedigree-obsessed than their US equivalents. And by all first-
hand accounts I've heard, the French Écoles des Hautes Études tend to be
filled with urban elites bound for government posts.

Maybe Germany or Scandinavian countries are different but I think that being
obsessed with academic prestige is pretty universal in the developed world,
it's just that US universities like Harvard or Stanford have emerged as focal
points for this global obsession.

~~~
throwaway999888
You'll note that it was grand parent that called me a _European_ and not me.
He happened to be right. But maybe that should tell you something about how I
don't pretend to speak for an entire continent but just my corner of it. Maybe
a part of the world with 50 countries has some variety within it, I don't
know.

And personally I don't identify as a _European_. I prefer _Eurasian_... ;)

P.S. English class-consciousness is a pretty funny thing.

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xacaxulu
paywall

~~~
kornish
I couldn't reproduce - you can just close the modal that pops up with no
adverse effects.

In any case, when an article is paywalled, you generally get around it by
clicking the "web" link under the HN title, then clicking on the top result in
Google.

~~~
MattyMc
"You have reached your article limit." Disappointing.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
Delete all cookies for the site, reload.

~~~
poooogles
Works in this case, won't on most modern paywalls. New Yorker for example uses
Supercookies/Fingerprinting to give your UUID back to you.

