
How the Internet will disrupt higher education’s most valuable asset: Prestige - chewymouse
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-web-will-disrupt-higher-educations-most-valuable-asset-prestige/2016/02/05/6bddc1ee-c91e-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html
======
WalterBright
If I had attended Caltech remotely, I wouldn't have lasted a semester. I had a
lot of generous help from others, mostly fellow students, and sometimes a
professor.

Besides, being around a pack of intelligent, highly motivated people (what
their admissions select for) 24/7 was incredibly fun. I mean, you're around
people who build CPUs out of 7400 ttl chips, people who build stereo equipment
from scratch just because it's fun, people who build a working railroad
running through the dorms, and on and on. If you want to see what it was like,
see the movie "Real Genius", which was based on events at Caltech. The movie
exaggerates, but not as much as you might think :-)

Edit: I also have to admit that the embarrassment of failing was a motivator
that wouldn't exist if I attended remotely, along with the shared camaraderie
of working on and succeeding at something hard.

~~~
petra
I'm curious what would happen , if we gather a few classes of intelligent
highly motivated students , arrange them a cheap nice place to live , give
them them great educational content(not the stuff you get out of today's
mooc's , the good stuff that the UK's open university - an expert in remote
learning - designed over decades) , give them some support and some tools(labs
, parts, etc) , and connect them through the web to their respective
communities.

Surely that could be much cheaper. But would be just as good ? maybe.

And as for prestige ? if you build the admission process on extremely high
standards , and offer something unique that the big universities won't offer ,
maybe you'll manage to get extremely talented students. And that's the key for
building prestige.

Makes sense ?

EDIT: one more question - once you're an esteemed graduate of this institution
,sort of a "navy seal", in this day and age where talent is the limited
resource in making money(and surviving in business), how hard would it be to
arrange the networking ?

Ans isn't all this kinda like what ycombinator did?

~~~
WalterBright
I think that still underestimates the effect the professor has on the
students. There's nothing like a professor who is excited about the topic of
his lectures. Take a look at some of Feynman's youtube lectures, and imagine
hearing that stuff in person!

It's like the difference between listening to a CD and going to a concert.

~~~
petra
Great teachers(not feynman's level, but still great) for standard
subjects(math, physics, etc) shouldn't be that expensive. There are still a
lot of savings to be had.

~~~
eru
Especially if you select your teachers for actual teaching ability, as opposed
to citation count on their papers. Teaching ability is undervalued by the
market.

------
cubano
I've become more and more convinced over the years that "higher education" is
much more about signalling and not-so-much about learning, although of course
part of the signal is showing your ability to learn on demand and just "show-
up" and do what you are told.

Of course, networking has always been a big part of _the benefit_ being
accepted to an elite university, so while I accept the learning part of it
will be easily disrupted, I am not really convinced (yet) that the signalling
and the networking can be replaced so easily.

[edits]

~~~
rayiner
Networking is not a big part of getting accepted to an elite university.
Harvard, Yale, etc, are chock-full of first generation or second generation
immigrants who have little in the way of networks with the sorts of old-money
institutional backers of those universities.

~~~
0xffff2
I think you're reversing the point. Networking isn't a requirement to get into
an elite university. Rather, the ability to network with other people going to
an elite university is one of the most significant benefits of being accepted.

------
roymurdock
Title is misleading.

 _As the Internet chips away at the practical reasons for limiting the student
population, the real reason Yale limits the size of its classes will become
more obvious._

Decreased barriers to entry of getting a degree will draw attention to the
fact that it is (and arguably always has been) 20% about what you learn, 80%
about who you meet.

MOOCs are not going to disrupt prestige, they're going to make it even more
important as a signal in an increasingly noisy market.

~~~
fma
Yep...MOOC will disrupt community colleges and your run of the mill state
school.

~~~
petra
Just like in the UK , the open university is equivalent or better(because it
shows self-motivation) than most schools , excepts the top , like Cambridge.

------
fiatmoney
The real reason class sizes are limited isn't to maintain an "air of
exclusivity", it's because the social networks that allow kickbacks and mutual
aid only work if they're limited to a certain size. "Prestige" isn't a naked
payoff, it's a proxy for access to that social network.

~~~
tomp
I don't think that's true. The MBA class at Colombia is 700 people. Every
year.

That's not _a_ social network. It's _a number of_ social networks. It's
inevitable that you'll only connect with a smaller number of classmates, and
AFAIK classes are even organized with that in mind (the whole generation is
split into smaller groups that then have classes together).

~~~
nostrademons
They're pretty closely intertwined, though, in the sense that you can probably
find people in your network who share a person or network in common with
someone you're trying to reach. At least that was how it was at my small,
elite liberal arts college of 400 people/year. I didn't know everyone in my
class, but if someone went there at the same time as me, it's almost
guaranteed that there is at least one person there we knew in common.

The whole point of networking is so you don't have to cold-approach someone
and there'll be someone or something you have in common. The whole point of
social networking tools (LinkedIn, Facebook) is so you know who that person
is.

------
lordCarbonFiber
This author seems to think the value of prestige arises from nothing; as if
the fact that someone can get through one class on open courseware means they
are equally qualified as any other graduate. One quote in particular stuck
with me "few students are accepted to Yale but almost all graduate". What
exactly did he expect? Why would admissions accept people they think are
unlikely to be successful? The whole article is written as if candidates are
chosen by a simple dice roll, uniformly taken across the population (mirroring
those who now have access via the internet).

The value, from an employment standpoint at the very least, is not what you
learned in school, but the reasons you were selected to participate in the
community doing the learning. The elite institutions spend considerable time
and expense collecting a curated group of top performers to a single location.
From a creative and developmental perspective this is huge for the students.
From a signalling perspective this huge for employers.

My prediction, perhaps as laughably misguided as I think this article is, is
that the paridime shift will come from employers. As taboos against training
wear away, and groups begin to see how much cheaper it can be to hire and
train high school graduates the demand for college graduates will abate. This
probably won't effect the Columbias, or the Yales of the world, but will
likely eliminate most of the hugely expensive less prestigious institutions.

------
dluan
I don't think the internet has quite figured out _prestige_. Twitter,
BuzzFeed, Quora, Reddit, and even HN have certainly figured out popularity,
network effects, and buzz, but I don't think social networks can develop
prestige, because there's so much elasticity about your social network
presence and where you spend your time.

Prestige is such an interesting phenomena, in that it's a weird mix of
purchasable brandname and non-purchasable exclusivity. I'm not even sure what
the most prestigious website on the internet would be: wikipedia?

~~~
petra
Why not ? at least before eternal september , wasn't the HN karma system
pretty good ?

~~~
dluan
IMO voting based networks have some pretty big flaws, beyond obvious ones of
gaming and a bias towards recency. Prestige partly works because it's
technically hard to game or fake.

------
hapless
Everyone has always known that paying for an Ivy diploma means purchasing the
prestige and connections required to enter America's elite. The conceit that
it was a superior education has always been, to some extent, a fig leaf.

MOOCs are tearing frantically at the fig leaves, but the underlying business
model is entirely unharmed. The best students will still crawl over bodies to
gain admittance. Tuitions will remain high. The alumni will still make
extraordinary endowments.

------
praveenster
Not entirely true. Granted, you might be able to gain a lot of knowledge via
MOOCs, however, I feel that the experience of human interaction with other
students and the professor cannot be replicated via the internet.
Additionally, I think the issue of prestige is a self fulfilling prophecy in
that good schools get bright students and the interaction between them
increases the overall intellect of the student community in that school.

~~~
fma
I share the same feeling about MOOC in general (whether prestige, or not).

It's like saying online porn will replace sex - since at the end, you orgasm.

~~~
return0
Someone should research the statistics, what percentage of orgasms are
remotely induced.

------
fma
As long as the good ol boy's network exist - people will always want to go to
Ivy League and other prestigious universities. It will continue till the top
CEOss graduate from "Southern New Hampshire University"...and I doubt
shareholders and board of directors want to nominate a CEO from "Southern New
Hampshire University" so you probably want to be a founder.

~~~
ashark
Someone[1] commented on another, similar thread a while back that one
important function of top private universities is to _launder_ the educations
of children of the rich—that is, to ensure that, provided they can put in
enough effort to not fail out entirely, they'll have credentials that look
very similar to those of only the smartest and most-driven students from the
other 99% of society. I'd never looked at it that way, but it makes a lot of
sense. Fits right in with your "who wants a CEO from Southern New Hampshire
U?" notion.

In exchange, I suppose, the poorer students get to network with the people who
may later fund their business.

[1] Don't remember who, so I can't provide credit

------
johngalt
I'm seeing a large number of comments talking about the in person effects of
traditional education. Not just as it relates to education, but also ongoing
employment. The two issues seem to boil down to:

1\. Social status signaling. Including networking among alumni.

2\. An environment with interpersonal interactions among the top performers
will push you further than working solo.

Rather than simply saying "MOOCs don't do 1&2", we should phrase it as "what
will it look like when they do?". Clearly the internet can handle social
status signaling. The internet can also organize groups around specific
interests. There are unique social groups that exist now precisely because of
the internet.

For now MOOCs are a web version of correspondence courses. Is that all they
will ever be? I doubt it. If I had to bet on education 100 years from now, I'd
expect it to look more like MOOCs than the traditional collegiate experience.
Certainly there are gaps in what exists today, but I'd expect those gaps to
close faster than traditional colleges will adjust.

------
WalterBright
Online education is not new. Before the internet, you could get a college
degree by taking correspondence courses. It's how my grandfather got a degree
(he was too poor for college). He liked it so much he became a salesman for
the online courses, and met my grandmother through selling her mechanical
engineering courses. (In 1920. Yes, there were women engineers then.)

------
noonespecial
To successfully compete with the Ivy league, onlines will have to provide a
way for their students to signal two things:

1) I'm the kind of person who _can_ pay larger amounts of money than most for
an education.

2) I know and am known by lots of people who fit into the group described by
#1.

Until that happens I don't think any ivy covered bricks are coming tumbling
down any time soon.

~~~
eru
Compare
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197)
: the universities also want smart people, even when they are poor. (They are
offering financial help for that, especially at the Ivy league.)

------
sknuds
“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep
us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we
want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t
want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.” - Randy Pausch

------
zecho
Thought I was reading The Onion for a moment. Nobody cites Frank Bruni as a
source unironically, do they?

>"...it will be harder and harder for Yale to explain what it offers for all
that money except a piece of paper that says you went to Yale."

Yale has been clear about that since roughly 1693.

------
rayiner
I think it's pretty funny that MOOC's bought into the premise that the purpose
of higher education was education. Seriously: what fraction of what you do on
the job isn't something you couldn't have learned at a three-month company
training course? Outside of highly specialized fields, it's probably not much.

I think the universities understand a lot better than the MOOCs that the point
was never that Stanford had education you can't get elsewhere, but that it
lets you tell people you went to Stanford and other people didn't.

~~~
harryh
What exactly are you signaling to employers with your Stanford admission
though? It's not really clear to me.

Intelligence? That's pretty easy to measure on its own. Hard work? Hoop
jumping?

I'm not really sure. And I say this as someone who hires programmers and sees
a CS Degree from Stanford as a pretty strong positive.

~~~
rayiner
I think it says something about both conscientiousness and intelligence to
meet the SAT/GPA requirements for getting into Stanford. And when you look at
someone's grades at a good college or graduate school, I think it says
something that they managed to do well while competing with a bunch of other
smart people.

------
stillsut
I'd consider the #1 to #5 (out of 10,000 students) in Ng's MachineLearning
Coursera more compelling than 'A' from his on-campus class.

So by making it a national competition, MOOCs have an advantage for those
companies seeking high quality candidates.

Also, they deliver a more standardized training experience: Even if you took
some interesting but non-conventional AI class at Harvey Mudd, it might be
better for companies hiring junior devs to just know you're competent at the
basics from your online work.

------
Scoundreller
I dream of the day when prestigious PGP private keys are sold because of the
prestige associated with them.

~~~
eru
Isn't that bitcoin?

~~~
Scoundreller
In a way, but I meant a day where one buys a PGP private key for its good
name/trust/prestige. Like buying a newspaper company today so you can control
the output message.

------
jrkelly
YC is the only credible threat to elite higher education that I've seen come
out of Silicon Valley.

~~~
eru
Getting Facebook or Google on your resume probably also helps with getting
another programming job.

------
jimhefferon
I checked a number of times. It seems that the article is from this week, but
it sure reads like any number of articles from five or six years ago.

Just as a for instance, putting everyone in a MOOC proves to be more of a
problem than it may at first seemed to some people.

------
jkyle
I may be in a unique position in commenting on this phenomena. I graduated
from a well regarded university as a undergraduate (too man) years ago and
have been working in industry for approximately 12 years or so. As my career
evolved, I realized I wanted to specialize and I've always appreciated the
formality and rigors of school.

But all those things that happen over 12 years of working made returning for a
masters infeasible e.g. wife, kids, an appreciation for meals that do not
involve ramen noodles and hotdogs... About a year ago I had the opportunity to
apply to Georgia Tech's Online Master's of Computer Science program
(OMSCS).[1][2] I'm currently 1/2 through the program.

I've taken online courses before and I consistently (2 or 3 times a year)
attended local community college classes on various topics or refreshers. But
I feel the OMSCS program is doing it differently and, largely, is "getting it
right". I'll try to cover the most common critiques of MOOC's and how I think
OMSCS can, hopefully, serve as a model for other universities to expand into
remote learning.

Attending a University is as much about the culture/people/experience as the
raw knowledge

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I completely agree. However, GATech's program has made collaboration between
students a priority. We're given a lot of tools including weekly group video
conferencing with TA's, very active student forums, actively
engaged/participant professors and TA's, and local study groups for students
in the same general area. In some ways, I feel _even more_ connected to
professors than I did when on campus. Generally the professor was available in
class, office hours, and through email. Email response was often spotty or too
a few days. I get responses from a professor, TA, or student within a day if
not within hours on the forums. Student provided answers often receive a "+1"
by TA's or professors or a correction/clarification if that is needed.

However, it's true that the 'flow' of conversation is not as dynamic and as a
consequence can be less engaging as in classroom settings given the delay of
forum communication. Also, I'm sure the on campus students have access to many
of these tools as well. For me personally, I was less likely to leverage the
other tools if I'd already sat in class that day.

Recruiters and employers look for the 'signal' that comes with a prestigious
university program

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I feel this is over played. MIT, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, etc. are
obviously good schools. But anyone whose been interviewing and hiring for any
amount of time knows they're not guarantees and much more goes into a good
employee than simply making it through a rigorous academic program. But you it
does carry _some_ weight. Just not as much as many imply.

One of the reasons I selected this program is the degree rewarded is
indistinguishable from their on campus degree. The "signal" this provides for
students and employers is the university is willing to put their full faith
and credit behind the education I'm purchasing. If MOOC's are to succeed this
is the only model that will work. Why should I pay the university if they
insist on signaling that it is a lesser education through degree
differentiation. If they are incapable of delivering the same rigor and
quality, I'd rather just read a book or take a free course.

MOOC's aren't a threat to prestigious education, just community colleges and
small schools

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not sure I agree. Community colleges are already very affordable. Georgia
Tech is in the top 5 computer science programs in the country. That's a high
degree of prestige. If they can deliver on their promise, maintain the quality
of students & education their delivering, if they issue degrees
indistinguishable from the on campus degrees, and if they can do so at higher
volumes and good profit margins other high end universities _should_ feel very
threatened. Particularly since since the margins are quite large. All the
tuition goes towards the professors, TA's, and a smidgin of an amount toward
infrastructure. And they can handle much larger student bodies.

That means more highly qualified STEM workers carrying your degree. Which
incurs more prestige on your program and attracts more students...which you
can actually accept if qualified.

1\. [http://www.omscs.gatech.edu](http://www.omscs.gatech.edu)

2\. Full disclaimer: I work for AT&T, a partner in the creation of the OMSCS
program with Georgia Tech & Udacity, though I had no involvement in that
process other than benefitting as a student.

------
FiatLuxDave
I think that the biggest effect of prestige in the college market is that it
is a barrier to entry for new colleges and universities. Forget MOOCs for a
second. Just think about new, regular colleges. If half the faculty of Harvard
quit tomorrow and started a new university (say, "New Cambridge University"),
accepting half the number of new students that Harvard did, even though the
education would be obviously on par with a Harvard education, the new
university still would not have the prestige of Harvard.

This effect is what is allowing the rent seeking behavior of administrators
and contractors which is driving the increase in college costs [1]. The wages
for professors, who provide the primary paid labor for the educational
process, has not increased, and the move to reduce the cost of professors by
switching to adjuncts has been extensively noted e.g. [2].

If professors felt free to simply start up a new college whenever they felt
that the cost of administration was getting out of hand, they would be able to
bid up the cost of their labor in step with the increase in tuition. But
because the prestige effect is so strong, they have less power in the
relationship than the administrators. Note that professors with star power
reputations do not have this dynamic, as they have prestige of their own.

I think that MOOCs may be the wrong direction to look for a solution. Prestige
is strongly correlated with the age of an institution. The Ivy League was
originally called such because the buildings were old enough to have ivy
covering their walls, unlike the newer colleges of the time. It is also
correlated with the accomplishments associated with an institution. A MOOC is
just asking for trouble in the prestige department! Just look at how people
with a Georgia Tech online masters have to explain it as being equal in worth
to an in-person experience. You don't need to explain to your mom why Yale is
close to Harvard in prestige. Maybe someday that will change, but it's not an
answer to the problem today.

Instead, a more low-tech but more likely to work answer is to restore control
of the prestige to the faculty and take that power away from the
administrators. This may take the form of internal changes to the existing
universities, or maybe things will get bad enough that there will be a mass
exodus of professors starting their own colleges.

[1][http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all)

[2][http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-college-so-
expensive...](http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-college-so-expensive-if-
professors-are-paid-so-little/)

