

Higher Education’s Toughest Test - cwan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/24/higher-education%E2%80%99s-toughest-test/

======
aksbhat
Following are the counterpoints to their argument:

1\. decreasing ROI on a college degree: They are confusing between supply and
demand. While it is possible in future that a college degree will no longer
provide an edge over High-School diploma, yet this might lead to even more
intense competition for top schools. They cite Law schools as an example,
however there isn't a uniform decrease in enrollment. In fact a bad job market
means that you need to go to even better/reputed university than before. Also
it does not means that alternate signaling mechanism is going to alleviate
this problem.

The issue is the demand, assuming that in future the number of jobs available
for college graduates decrease. This wont help alternative credential
providing mechanisms. The reason people are hiring via git hub and stack
overflow, is because there is an excess demand and low supply. If anything a
bad job market will only lead to more competition for top universities.

2\. MIT open course ware/ ITunes University etc. : While these websites make
it easier for you to get access to the knowledge, yet they dont provide you
other things which are needed, such as access to labs, examination etc.

3\. Github / Stackoverflow :

Systems such as Github and Stackoverflow tend to have Pareto distribution i.e.
top 20% have 80% contribution/reputation. Even if you are building a
credentialing system, it needs to have a distribution similar to the grade
curve used in colleges. Also at the same time, you must make sure that there
is "some" protection of academic integrity.

~~~
pjscott
The uneven distribution of contributions doesn't matter so much on Github,
since when an employer goes to scout out someone on Github, they're typically
looking at the code itself, rather than the quantity of it.

~~~
aksbhat
Think of it this way, it is easier for anyone to write code for solving simple
problem. however this does not makes you stand out from the crowd, also at the
same time there is no guarantee that the same person wrote the code, i.e. it
wasn't plagiarized.

A good metric for measuring ability of git hub user is to look for followers
of his repos. Github is useful only when someone is making large amount of
contribution or significant contribution, such as solving a hard problem.

A college can give someone A- in introductory algorithms and that gives you
some confidence about his skills in algorithms. However github cannot provide
this sort of credential, with same amount of confidence. Github can spot
"exceptional" programmers, since large or significant contributions are more
difficult to fabricate.

------
ssharp
The idea of an education bubble seems a little dramatized, and link-baity.

The devaluing of higher-education as a whole, by the world of startups, shows
the tunnel vision that exists in the startup world. Sure, if I saw an
exceptionally bright 17/18 year-old who could program, maybe that person would
be better off starting a startup than going to school, but not everyone is an
entrepreneur. Not everyone is a programmer who can take advantage of the low
cost environment for web/software startups. Lots of good, high-paying jobs
require college education. Data shows that a Bachelor's degree is a good
investment.

~~~
jgesture
Seeing all these types of articles as devaluing higher-education as a whole is
going further than necessary and only considering phenomena such as Facebook,
Microsoft or Apple (wildly successful software companies started by dropouts)
is probably not going far enough.

As far as actual learning goes, educational institutions are great in cases
where the knowledge is hard to access, expensive or dangerous. If you want to
be a doctor, you can't just go to and get a cadaver or an MRI machine to
practice on, these are expensive. If you want to learn how to run a nuclear
power plant, you can't go buy radioactive material to learn with, there are
national security concerns with that. Learning how to fly a plane is dangerous
and planes are expensive. But educational institutions can address all of
these issues.

Using the term bubble is perhaps an effort to sensationalize the issue, I'm
not sure. In any case, I think it is certainly useful to look at fields where
access to knowledge is easy, cheap and safe and ask if an institution is
required for learning or if that's wrong thinking. It happens that writing
computer programs is one of those cases. This is probably why all of these
articles talk about software developers (them being posted on HN by
programmings probably has something to do with it too :)).

Saying that a system produces useful results is not that same as saying that a
system is optimal. Cars in the 1950s could get you places a lot faster than
walking, but that doesn't mean they got the best possible gas mileage.
Computers in the 1980s did amazing things, things that would be at least
impractical without them, but 1980s computers could've been a lot better,
orders of magnitude better. So, stating that educational institutions have
useful results is not necessarily a counterargument to the deficiencies in
educational institutions. In fact, I don't recall reading any article in this
recent string of education articles that claims that the problem with the
higher education system is that it doesn't produce useful results. In fact
such a statement is easily and, probably, objectively, verifiably falsifiable.
So this isn't a question of useful vs non-useful. This is a question of
optimal vs non-optimal.

------
tomjen3
This piece assumes that the only reason to go to college is to use it as a
social signal.

I don't buy that, nor do I believe I could have learned as much as I did in
college if I had had to learn it on my own.

Now if I could have skipped High School and elementary school...

------
sliverstorm
I clicked on this link hoping it might be about the toughest exam students
ever take in Higher Education, instead of yet another article on the 'bubble'.

I was baited.

~~~
pjscott
The toughest exam students ever take in higher education depends on the
student, and on what classes they take, as well as the circumstances.

I remember a particularly difficult final exam in which I was distracted by a
sudden thud from about five meters behind and to the left of me. A student had
fainted from fright, falling out of her chair. She was ushered out of the room
by a TA, to lie on a bench with her feet elevated for a while. Afterward, the
rest of us turned uncomfortably away from the spectacle, back to our tests.

I think, for that particular student, the toughest exam was that day. For me,
it was about a year later, under circumstances embarrassing enough that I
won't repeat them. For other students, other times. There's a surprising
amount of variation from person to person.

