
Enstitute, an Alternative to College for a Digital Elite - jfc
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/enstitute-an-alternative-to-college-for-a-digital-elite.html
======
ilaksh
You certainly want to market this as being for a "digital elite", at least for
the time being. And its best for technology professionals to maintain that
type of attitude as long as possible where the belief is that these types of
jobs require very rare intelligence and skillsets.

But I think that the realities of the situation are going to eventually change
the cultural attitudes towards high tech workers. For the vast majority of
high tech jobs, vocational training is not only much more economical, but also
vastly more effective. (I would even go so far as to say that vocational
training/apprenticeship activities are more effective at teaching more
conceptual and abstract concepts that one might consider to be part of a
traditional academic program, but thats not my main point.)

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

~~~
auctiontheory
There's no question that vocational training is more effective for a "job."
But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50 years?
And what are the options for un-degreed vocationally-trained people in their
30s or 40s who realize that the track they chose at 18 was the wrong choice
for them?

I don't know what the answers are. But let's at least ask the right questions.

(I realize that Germany and some other European countries do an excellent job
of vocational training.)

~~~
voidlogic
>>But is vocational training adequate for a "career" that spans 40 or 50
years?

Not only that, but is vocational training adequate to create citizens equipped
with the skills and knowledge to make them capable of analyzing the policy
decisions voters in a modern democracy must consider? Some people will claim
the traditional college system has failed in this regard, but they are
confusing failure with lack of perfection. I'm sure not every citizen needs to
go to college to have these skills, but I think most do, and this is
especially important in regressive regions of the country.

~~~
derefr
Technically, this is what _high school_ is supposed to do. That's why the
government is willing to pay for it.

If it's not doing that, we probably need more of it. Maybe move all the
"general liberal-arts undergrad education" into just being grades 13-16?

~~~
nitrogen
_If it's not doing that, we probably need more of it._

One must be careful with this type of reasoning. It leads to all kinds of
madness. I'll leave coming up with examples as an exercise for the reader;
there are too many to list.

Edit: I will give one example: a homeowner is disappointed that the lawn he or
she fertilizes once a month is turning brown and growing poorly. Fertilizer is
supposed to make plants grow, right? So if the plants aren't growing, add
more? Now, after being fertilized once per week, the lawn dies.

~~~
derefr
This is one of those cases where I started with a disclaimer, and then removed
it to make my statement more pithy, because _of course_ it doesn't apply in
general--so the Principle of Charity should tell you I'm working from the
facts of the specific case, instead of making an inference from a (misguided)
universal. :)

Specifically, my original statement was going to be:

> If high school isn't accomplishing its goals (of giving citizens the tools
> to participate in democracy) -- _and we see the need to supplement that
> education with years of additional university education to achieve the
> originally-intended effect_ \-- then we probably just need to make those
> years of university education _part_ of high school, mandatory, and free.

------
michaelochurch
First problem: doesn't scale. This whole "college is obsolete" meme falls flat
when we start to talk about scaling. Not everyone who's in college belongs
there, but for at least 200-500 thousand people each year, it's the best thing
for them. How are you going to scale up the Thiel Fellowship or "be Hilary
Mason's protegee" to the number of people attending college?

Also, tuition is going up because admissions (at top universities) are
becoming an insoluble problem. They're now (by their own admission) turning
away 3-5 fully qualified applicants for every acceptance. There really is no
good way to sort through the applications at this point; you pick away the
obvious "yes" (1%) pile and the unqualified 25% or so, and then it's guesswork
over the remaining 74. Tuition is just part of the selection process. It's
horrible that many people, through no fault of their own, can't compete; but
there it is. It's not that colleges are evil or "greedy" more than anyone
else. It's just that they can charge ridiculous prices without a measurable
decline in academic quality (because 17-year-olds just aren't that different,
no matter what they're told). Not by intention, they ended up running a
protection racket over the entire middle-class job market.

As much as these gold-plated apprenticeship programs might be a good idea-- I
like the concept of getting people in the real world before they're 22-- I see
them as political disasters, especially given how fucked the people born
1985-1992 have been. At some point, the 19-year-old protegee becomes a
20-year-old employee. How, exactly, is one going to make that work? If the
Benefactor (e.g. Mason, not to pick on her but because the OP mentioned her)
continues the relationship then (a) s/he's going to get overextended after a
few years of that, and (b) the team will be sabotaged by resentful people who
didn't get the "CxO's protege" track. If the Benefactor doesn't continue the
relationship, then the jilted protege fails in the same way that jilted
proteges always go down. Either they melt down (upset that the favoritism
doesn't continue and they become "just another employee") or they are torn
down in their time of weakness.

I'm glad I had a liberal arts, general education _because_ there is so much
instability in the world. College is expensive and inefficient, but I don't
see a solution to that problem here. Sure, it might seem like a good move for
an individual to drop college for a "CTO protege" program, but careers are
long...

~~~
rayiner
Here's the other thing: the college is obsolete folks are targeting the wrong
people. Thiel encourages smart kids not to go to college, then asks why we
have twitter rather than flying cars. But we've yet to devise an alternative
to the educational military industrial complex for capital intensive
innovation (flying cars). Elon Musk isn't hiring a bunch of people without
college educations to work at Tesla or Space X. Thiel fellows aren't going to
perfect nuclear fusion or carbon capture.

The people who shouldn't be going to college are the non elite. We need Thiel
fellowships for people who would be going to Perimeter State, not Stanford.

~~~
dfield
Taylor Wilson might disagree with you... :)

(disclaimer: i'm a thiel fellow)

~~~
rayiner
Taylor Wilson is obviously brilliant, but he's about a million times more
likely to have a lasting impact on nuclear science staying in university and
leveraging institutional resources and knowledge than he is going it alone.
The $100k you get from a Thiel fellowship is basically pocket change. Maybe he
can do something with it, but he could do more faster if he had real
resources, like a DOE contract.

