
Jailbreaking the Degree - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/05/jailbreaking-the-degree/
======
dkrich
I don't think it's a coincidence that the major proponents of doing away with
traditional higher education and questioning the value of a college degree are
people with at least one degree (in many instances advanced degrees as well)
from very prestigious institutions. They believe that in a practical sense,
what you really need to know to perform you can gain more efficiently by
doing. They ask "Who knows better than somebody with expensive degrees how
worthless they are?"

I completely disagree with that and I believe the opposite is true. Only
people without degrees can speak reliably about whether they regret the
decision or not. They actually put themselves on the line. I'm not convinced
when I hear people with degrees say that they wish they had known that they
didn't need them before or that they would have been just as well without
them. That's like somebody who paid for flood insurance claiming "who knows
better than I how worthless flood insurance is?" Perhaps the guy down the
street who didn't buy it and lost his house.

Edit: And to the author's point about iTunes vs buying full albums- that
analogy is faulty. There have been community colleges around for many, many
years, but the reality is that companies just don't value individual
coursework as favorably as an entire degree, particularly one from a
prestigious school. The purchaser of a song has very different objectives than
a hirer. A song purchaser wants one song and does not want to pay ten times
the price to buy an entire album which might have three songs that he likes.
Clearly, single purchases are more efficient.

But when it comes to hiring, there is no added cost. If I am hiring for a
position with a stated salary, I want the most qualified person I can find. If
I can hire a guy with three degrees in Computer Science from MIT, I don't
really care about the guy with the Microsoft and Cisco certification, even if
those are things that are precisely what you need to know on the job. College
is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are naive to
believe that it isn't. If you pull back and decide you are going to turn down
MIT and go learn just the skills you need for your job, there are going to be
5,000 people lined up behind you ready to saddle themselves with debt and work
through four years of college to get the degree and you will facing an uphill
battle. So in the case of iTunes, a comparable situation is if I had $0.99 to
spend on a song, and had hundreds of full albums with that song offered for my
$0.99. In that case, I am not going to buy the single song.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_College is absolutely an intelligence test and screening tool, and people are
naive to believe that it isn't._

If correct, college is merely a wasteful arms race - many people wasting
resources to outcompete others in a zero-sum competition for a fixed set of
jobs.

Thus, we should tax colleges and education in order to discourage people from
attending, as well as construct cheaper screening mechanisms and encourage
their use. For example, we could scrap subsidies for education (e.g., state
colleges) and replace them with standardized testing centers.

If far fewer people went to college, it would be much more costly for
employers to reward wasteful signalling.

~~~
dkrich
> Thus, we should tax colleges and education in order to discourage people
> from attending, as well as construct cheaper screening mechanisms and
> encourage their use. For example, we could scrap subsidies for education
> (e.g., state colleges) and replace them with standardized testing centers.

I do not consider myself a republican or tea partier, but I really despise
these types of plans aimed at controlling behavior. It works in some cases,
but this is not something the government should be mucking with. They've done
enough damage to higher education as it is. The last thing the US should be
doing is making it even harder for kids to go to college. If anything they
should be giving more money to the schools to make it affordable. The problem
with college is not what you do or don't learn. Every form of school will
involve wasted time. The real problem is the cost to attend.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I don't know what republicans and the tea party have to do with this. I'm
making a simple economic argument.

Based on your reasoning, attending college has social costs and no social
benefits. I.e., if you go to college and I don't, you get the job and I don't.
If neither of us went to college, one of us would still get the job.

So your college attendance merely redistributes jobs from others to you, and
destroys the wealth it took to educate you. This is a classic example of a
market failure and a classic use case for pigouvian taxes.

While helping a few kids go to college would benefit them, the benefit would
only come at the expense of others (the guy you won't hire because he lacks a
pointless degree). So why do you want to do this?

~~~
dkrich
Republicans and tea-partiers tend to favor less government. When people hear
somebody say something that coincides with that point of view they often
assume the person is a republican.

>Based on your reasoning, attending college has social costs and no social
benefits. I.e., if you go to college and I don't, you get the job and I don't.
If neither of us went to college, one of us would still get the job.

Not at all. I think people who have a degree appear more favorable if all
other things are equal. Many jobs have a degree listed as prerequisite. If
neither of us has one then neither of us will be getting the job.

There are just a whole lot of assumptions present in your argument: that a
college degree is worthless and that having obtained a college degree is all
that differentiates two applicants. Clearly the degree is not pointless if the
best jobs are given to those who have them. There is no market failure. If the
market for non-college graduates were hotter than the market for college
graduates, then college would be free and most would have to close.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Many jobs have a degree listed as prerequisite. If neither of us has one then
neither of us will be getting the job._

Many jobs have wearing a suit as a prerequisite. Would employers simply not
hire anyone and close their doors if everyone refused to wear a suit?

 _Clearly the degree is not pointless if the best jobs are given to those who
have them._

Clearly a suit is not pointless if the best jobs are given to those who have
them.

You are completely missing the point. The issue is that the degree is socially
harmful while being individually beneficial, _according to your own arguments
in favor of receiving one_.

~~~
dkrich
> Many jobs have wearing a suit as a prerequisite. Would employers simply not
> hire anyone and close their doors if everyone refused to wear a suit?

That's my point. In a market that has many buyers and few sellers, the buyers
do not get to set the price. So there would never be a scenario in which
everyone would refuse to wear a suit. Creating hypotheticals in which every
job applicant acts in tandem is a pointless endeavor. If the employer states
that you have to show up at 8, wear a suit, have a degree, accept a certain
rate of pay, and never leave before 6pm, you will do those things. If you
don't, that's okay, somebody else will. Just like I can't set the price of the
iPhone just because I don't like paying the full price. The day Apple has
trouble selling iPhones then I might be able to negotiate.

> The issue is that the degree is socially harmful while being individually
> beneficial, according to your own arguments in favor of receiving one.

These are inferences that you are making. I do not think that formal education
is harmful to society. The U.S. has the greatest higher education system in
the world by a long, long, shot. I do not think it is wise for us to try to
tear down from within one of our greatest competitive advantages. There is a
reason that people from all over the world are fighting to get into our
schools.

BTW, I find it kinda curious that you are railing so hard against higher ed.
Was it before or after your third degree that you decided education is such a
poor investment?

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Was it before or after your third degree that you decided education is such a
poor investment?_

I didn't claim that a degree is a poor investment for individuals, I claim
that the signalling aspect of education is harmful to society. Please try to
actually understand an argument before disputing it.

Incidentally, I concluded that education is primarily signalling while I was
selling it. I left academia in part because I felt I was creating very little
value.

------
_delirium
> Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take
> courses that I do not value?

One guess is that a reason employers value degrees is _precisely_ because it
indicates a willingness/ability to successfully complete tasks that you might
not personally value, but which are required in your institutional role. After
all, corporations are institutions that plan to require you to do things if
they hire you, some of which you might not value.

A somewhat less meta answer is that employers trust standard curricula enough
to not be interested in doing case-by-case evaluation of alternatives. So if
one person has a "4-year accredited electrical engineering degree", and
another person has passed a selection of EE courses they chose themselves, the
company will probably prefer the 1st. Evaluating the 2nd candidate requires
the company to decide whether that selection of courses constitutes a good EE
curriculum (versus, for example, the student having avoided all the hard or
math-heavy courses), and most companies don't know or want to know how to
evaluate student-customized curricula on a case-by-case basis.

------
Turing_Machine
"Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take
courses that I do not value?"

Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of
knowledge have "value"?

That's not to say that higher education doesn't need reform (or quite possibly
wholesale replacement). It does, desperately. I just question whether a person
who (by definition) doesn't possess a certain piece of knowledge is a good
judge of the value of that knowledge.

I'm put in mind of my undergrad CS degree -- lots of bitching about how the
courses weren't taught in C++ (the "hot" language of the day). Some of the
professors even used weird stuff like Lisp! Of course, the professors had been
around long enough to see "hot" languages come and go, and were choosing a
language thatillustrated the concept under discussion well (which could be
Lisp, could be C, could be assembly language, depending on what it was).

Of the classmates with whom I'm still in contact, I can't think of many whose
primary language for employment is C++.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Maybe a kid just out of high school isn't the best judge of what forms of
knowledge have "value"?_

Perhaps, but he's certainly a better judge than academics who's continued
employment depends on getting him to pay for their services. At least his
incentives are properly aligned.

When I was in college, my judgement was that the humanities and literature
would be useless while advanced math would come in handy. Nothing has happened
in the past 10 years to convince me this was incorrect.

~~~
_delirium
Judging by what electives students choose when they have the option, anything
with the word "math" anywhere in the vicinity is the first thing most students
would skip if they didn't have to take it! If many CS students I've known had
their way, all mathematical and theoretical content would be removed from the
CS curriculum, and replaced with "real-world" programming classes. Less
statistics, discrete math, and computability theory; more node.js, Ruby, and
advanced git.

Separately from that, on your other comment, I've run into a surprisingly
large number of people whose non-technical curricula have had a strong
positive impact on their technical jobs. For example, Richard Evans, the AI
lead on _Black & White_, _Sims 3_ , and now a new startup recently acquired by
Linden Labs, has a philosophy B.A., and credits it with being core to much of
his AI design (his current system is based on a logic modeled on
Wittgenstein's view of social interactions).

~~~
yummyfajitas
It appears that even at the age of 18-22, Richard Evans saw the value in
philosophy (as demonstrated by his choice of major).

Of the students who would choose to scrap math, how many are likely to make
serious use of their math skills if forced to study math in college?

------
stcredzero
_Why buy a whole album when I only value a few songs enough to purchase? Why
am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take courses
that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular format, the
four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses that the
consumer should be enabled to avoid._

So maybe a better analogy for higher education bundling would be with Cable
TV?

EDIT: If teaching-oriented professors could start offering CaaS (Course as a
Service) of one or a few related courses, then the market would no longer be
the profs at a particular school, or the profs in all the schools in town, but
rather the best profs offering courses on the Internet from the whole online
world, then we could see a tremendous increase of access for high quality
education.

Then the most successful profs could "franchise" the syllabus and teaching
methods to other profs. (Syllabus as a service.) In the meantime, others could
start aggregating collections of syllabi as "majors," "minors," or other kinds
of course sequences.

------
vectorpush
As far as credentials, it seems to me like an "online" degree is worse than no
degree at all. There is a horrible stigma regarding the quality of online
degrees and doubt regarding the judgement of those who pursue them. This
perception can definitely change in the future, but I suspect it won't be for
a very long time.

~~~
hv23
Historically, yes-- due to the likes of University of Phoenix, etc.-- but this
is already changing as large, well-respected institutions like Stanford and
MIT embrace different methods of online learning.

Sure, taking an online course (or series of courses) from Stanford/MIT doesn't
have the same perceived value as doing the equivalent coursework offline, but
the brand name of those institutions lends significant credibility to any work
you do associated with them.

------
evoxed
> Post the photo to our Facebook Page or Twitter with the caption...

Guess I'll just have to wait this one out for now. Hopefully they'll open it
up soon.

------
nickpinkston
Anyone else getting an OAUTH error when they try to sign-up with
<http://degreed.com> (in the article)?

~~~
davidblake
@Nick thanks for the heads up. It is isolated to users without a live FB
session. We are fixing it ASAP.

------
kijin
> _Why am I required to finance an entire degree only to be forced to take
> courses that I do not value? By bundling education into its most popular
> format, the four-year degree, we are inevitably adding low-utility courses
> that the consumer should be enabled to avoid._

That's a problem with the curriculum, not the overall concept of a 4-year
degree. There are schools that bundle useless courses as part of the required
curriculum just because a tenured prof wants to teach it in a large
auditorium. But other schools encourage students to build their own curricula
with the courses that offer the most value to them. Brown University, for
example, has been doing this for decades. It's not perfect, but it goes a long
way toward catering to the needs and desires of each student.

I have two (soon to be three) degrees in some combination of humanities and
social sciences, and I've thoroughly enjoyed all but one or two of the dozens
of courses I've taken so far. I've been fortunate because all the schools I've
attended have been quite flexible in their course-taking requirements. I wish
most students at many other universities enjoyed the same amount of choices.

On the other hand, there is something to be said in favor of requiring
engineering students, for example, to take a few courses in the humanities and
social sciences. If you think you don't need to know philosophy or history to
be a good engineer, you may find yourself at a disadvantage when dealing with
today's complicated techno-socio-political issues. I would hate to live in a
world where engineers did not stop to consider their work in a philosophical
and historical context.

Sure, you could study history outside of a college. High school really should
teach critical thinking skills. But the reality is that most people would
never even get a chance to think critically about topics in the humanities and
social sciences if they weren't required to do so by their college's
curriculum.

The same goes for requiring humanities students to take introductory courses
in math and science. Honestly, every college student should also be required
to take a course in practical computer use unless they can demonstrate that
they already know the stuff.

EDIT Clarification: There are plenty of other reasons to advocate a
reconsideration of the value of higher education as a whole, but a poorly
designed curriculum isn't the most important reason. That one can be fixed
without ditching the college altogether.

~~~
stcredzero
_I would hate to live in a world where engineers did not stop to consider
their work in a philosophical and historical context._

The parts of the old Soviet Union and China?

