
Forget Bribery – The Real Scam Is Pretending That Degrees Have Value - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-28/admissions-bribery-scandal-pretending-degree-has-value-is-a-scam
======
stirfrykitty
I've come to believe that many degrees are overrated, including my own CS
degree. I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time. While I don't
like bootcamps, there is no reason why there are no IT trade schools. Maybe
two years long. No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc. Not a
degree, but a trade school. Hell, my plumber makes more than my wife and I
together. He specializes in installing tankless water heaters. He makes a
mint.

I've never been impressed with Ivy league or other "rarified air" educational
establishments. I've worked around people from some of these places and almost
to a man, they reeked of one-upmanship, my father knows..., I know..., oh, you
went to <insert no-name university> while glancing down their nose at you.

I worked with a guy like this at UUNet who went to Brown. He thought he was
the cat's pajamas and everyone should defer to him because he went Ivy League.
Oddly enough (sarcasm), his mistakes were often corrected by those who
attended the no-name schools. He never saw the error of his ways. Daddy, after
all, was a prominent attorney in the DC area. Why this guy went IT is a
mystery. He would have been a better fit with the other sharks and scammers in
DC or on Wall Street.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> I could have learned what I did in a much shorter time.

I sincerely doubt it. For learning the non-practical fundamentals of, say,
computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a
university.

> Not a degree, but a trade school

So, only directly applicable skills, no theory and nuts-and-bolts
fundamentals? Sounds far inferior to a bachelor's degree.

The software field is known for being open to talented autodidacts, in a way
that, say, bridge engineering is not. That doesn't mean it makes sense to
dismiss the benefits of quality formal education.

Someone with a decent bachelor's degree in computer science will have a depth
and breadth of knowledge _far_ in excess of where they'd be if they'd spent
that time teaching themselves web development on the job.

> No BS courses like philosophy, social sciences, etc

Here in the UK, a STEM degree is quite 'pure', and you aren't expected to
study topics like philosophy. That doesn't mean there's no value in studying
them though. If philosophy struck you as a complete waste of time, then either
it was taught badly, or you failed to make the most of it.

~~~
scarface74
>I sincerely doubt it. For learning the _non-practical_ fundamentals of, say,
computer science, there is no known learning environment that beats a
university.

I think you kind of just made the point. Why would I pay for something that
isn’t practical?

~~~
zbentley
Because what may prove practical over a long term may not do so in the short
or medium term.

And because what counts as “practicality” changes as people progress through
their careers, but the foundations required to meet each new standard of what
counts as practical often remain the same (or change less).

~~~
ghaff
That's perhaps the key point. I have engineering degrees (not CS) yet I work
for a software tech company and do a lot of things that are much more about a
broader liberal arts education and extracurricular activities than they are
about specific technical courses I took. And, even when I did work as an
engineer, it mostly wasn't in an area where I directly applied coursework.

~~~
scarface74
And my business courses have helped a lot more in both undergrad and as an MBA
dropout.

Most of us are working to increase business value for companies - either by
making them money or by saving them money. They could care less about
“Cracking the Code” and LeetCode.

------
yingw787
Today, degrees are a way to communicate and verify to others that you have
generated and currently possess some amount of intellectual and social
capital, which in the right situations can be converted to financial,
political, and other hard forms of capital.

The recent scandals don't necessarily indicate a degree don't verify capital
stocks, but it does clearly demonstrate the divide between those who have
capital and those who do not, and the myriad methods capital perseveres in
self-preservation. And as these loopholes will most likely remain open in one
way or another, it will continue to teach this lesson across generations.

I think this, and numerous other blatant shows of power, underline just how
important it is to federate capital across class boundaries and prevent
capital concentration. The "old boys clubs" care about your pedigree. The SME
CEO cares about putting food on the table for his/her family and his/her
employees, and cares moreso for your merit. Greater capital distribution leads
to stricter capital verification (yes you are smart in practice) due to the
decentralization of trust, greater alignment between merit and success and
exercise of existing talent surpluses, and higher societal cohesion due to
greater class turnover.

------
taylodl
Education has value. Degrees are merely a conveyance of an education. The
educational institution is an indicator of the educational rigor. None of
these are perfect indicators.

If you're interviewing candidates and you have a candidate graduating from
Stanford, one from MIT and one from Middle-of-Nowhere State - which candidates
are you going to prefer? We can argue whether such preferential judgement is
justified. Living near the East Coast I can tell you I've met my share of MIT
grads who are idiots and Middle-of-Nowhere State grads who've been really
good. Yet the perception persists. Why? Because of the handful of truly
outstanding, even legendary, graduates the elite schools have had that Middle-
of-Nowhere State hasn't. Those handful of exceptional graduates skew people's
perception of reality for a really long time.

Who knows? Maybe this scandal will change people's perception of these elite
schools but I doubt it.

~~~
mrspeaker
So it sounds like you're saying the real scam is pretending that degrees have
value?

~~~
hangonhn
It can become a self-fullfilling prophecy: if most people believe that degrees
have value, then the people who compete for those spots at "elite" colleges
will go up, then the pool of high quality candidate goes up. Because the elite
schools have the pick of the litter, the chances that their student body and
thus their graduates will be successful goes up. This reinforces the
perception that the degrees have value and the cycle repeats. I think an
accident of history has started this cycle and it's going to endure for quite
a while. It's akin to Silicon Valley: engineers think that being in SV helps
them be successful and join the next rocketship. Startups get drawn to SV
because they think SV is where the magic happens. Because the pool of talent
and opportunities meet in SV, it reinforces the perception that SV is magic.

~~~
craftinator
I think you hit on the way economists define "value"; value is derived from
people believing something is valuable. Take gold or diamonds for example,
which were highly valued before they even had industrial usages. Yes, both are
pretty and are rare; however, there are many other equally pretty/rare things
that weren't valued as highly. The only value they had was from perception,
and that made the value real.

------
jseliger
If you haven't yet, you should read _The Case Against Education_. Though be
forewarned: if you work in most of the education-industrial complex, the book
may make you want to quit. [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-
against-educatio...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-
education-bryan-caplan)

~~~
paganel
I also strongly recommend Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society" [1]. It's not
mentioned in the wikipedia article but Illich makes a very good case for
looking at Government's support for higher education as basically a regressive
tax on the poor, as they (meaning the poor) attend university at a much lower
percentage compared to the middle and upper classes of society but they still
pay for the government's support of said universities (through direct or
indirect taxes, and nowadays by being financially forced out of residential
areas located close to good schools that are seen as gateways to prestigious
universities attended by the children of middle- and upper-class people).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society)

~~~
foolinaround
It can be argued that the percentage of the poor who attend university is high
considering the percentage of taxes that they actually pay ( compared to those
who earn more than them)

~~~
paganel
That's why I added the indirect taxes thing, which generally it's a regressive
and largely unescapable tax on the poor no matter what the Government decides
to do with the money.

Also, if I were to be a marxist (which I'm not, quite the contrary, even
though I do have a genuine admiration for Marx's thought) one could say that
the well-off have myriad other ways of "taxing" the poor which don't
necessarily involve direct monetary transactions, like asking those members of
the poor class (not sure what today's equivalent term would be) to work on top
of their agreed-upon working hours with no monetary compensation (I have a
feeling that the poor are a lot more likely to do over-time without
compensation compared to Silicon Valley people or to big-firm lawyers).

~~~
whiddershins
That last part is obviously untrue. In general, poor people do not work long
hours.

In general, corporate management employees work very long hours.

------
haditab
The Caltech argument in this argument doesn't take into account that Caltech
is a very small school. They enroll around 200 new undergrad students a year
which is about 1/10 the number most Ivy league schools admit. I think this is
the primary factor why you don't see many big name Caltech grads, there aren't
as many of them. Especially when you are comparing Caltech to ALL Ivy league
schools grouped together.

~~~
chabons
This, and the fact that they're a technical school by nature. Politics and
business garners more news cycles than hard science, and hence skews peoples
perception of the prestige of a university or success of their alumni. Look at
the number of Nobel prizes per capita and Caltech blows Harvard out of the
water. 17 Nobel prizes over 22k living alum for Caltech, versus 48 over 371k
for Harvard. Even if you only look at financial success, CalTech still comes
out ahead in both early and mid-career ([https://www.payscale.com/college-
salary-report/bachelors](https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-
report/bachelors)). They should try comparing to a state school with similar
academic focus and ratings.

TL;DR: Small school focusing on low-visibility fields is a poor comparison.

~~~
haditab
Exactly. Seems like the author was not qualified to write this article in any
way.

------
huehehue
It's a shame this piece doesn't function as much more than a Caltech/MIT
endorsement.

I dropped out and hate the system as much as the next guy, but to pretend that
degrees have _literally_ zero value and exist purely as a wealth transfer
mechanism is a bit shortsighted. The author discredits MOOCs in the very same
breath, but forgets to mention that thousands of companies are only using a
degree as a baseline and all it would take is for HR to start accepting a
slightly different piece of paper.

There will always be an Ivy club, fraternities, secret societies, and so on.
Flood the market with Ivy degrees and the social elite will pick something
else. But those are pretty small factions if you think about _everybody else_
, at the University of Nowhere Special.

------
thinkloop
> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not
> graduate many future elites

> As long as Ivy League alumni occupy positions of power, academic credentials
> will remain costly and scarce. Ongoing credential inflation is not evidence
> of a bubble about to burst, but a reflection of how successful the elites
> are at convincing the greater populace that degrees are valuable.

The underlying implication of the article doesn't seem to be hit home. If
"good" schools don't produce rich powerful/people, but "name" schools do,
that's because there is heavy corruption by the established elite to favor
their alma mater's to make sure their degrees remain valuable - is I think a
core tenet of the article.

------
crowdpleaser
Degrees themselves may not have much value, but the value of the degree is
that employers can use them to offload discrimination to schools.

Through disparate impact legislation and jurisprudence, employers can only
consider job applicants on narrow grounds. Schools have much more leeway to
admit/deny admission.

An employer would probably get sued for using IQ tests because blacks and
hispanics tend to do poorly on those tests. However, the ACT and SAT are
highly correlated with IQ and schools can and do use those to make admission
decisions. An employer that wants to filter for smart people would be well-
advised to hire from schools that only accept cognitively gifted students.

You can't refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't speak well, but you can
refuse to hire Jamal because he doesn't hold a degree from an institution that
refused to admit Jamal because he didn't get a high enough score in the
English section of the ACT/SAT.

~~~
carnagii
Harsh but true. Requiring advanced math classes as a gatekeeper for comp Sci
is also massively exclusionary and totally pointless because the vast majority
of programming jobs require no math at all.

------
donquichotte
"When something is both expensive and of no practical value, it’s clearly
intended as a means of wealth transfer."

Interesing, I had the same thought about expensive artwork.

------
bitexploder
A four year degree is now seen as the educational floor by most employers.
Heck, even police departments and many certifications are requiring you have a
four year degree (any degree will do). I think this trend is wrong headed, but
at the same time how do we change organizations to train on the job. It is
just a simple, and lazy, filter.

~~~
rooam-dev
Train on the job. Easier said than done. How would you know if the person is
even trainable? A degree should (not that ti does in many cases), but it
should. Like a driver's license.

~~~
danaris
It used to be the norm. Most people didn't go to college, they got jobs and
trained on the job. Most people were trainable just fine.

I don't think people have changed __that __much in the last few decades. Hell,
in the last few millennia.

Most people who don't appear to be trainable are actually just assholes who
want to make everyone else around them do the work.

------
heyyyouu
Tell that to the many tech and other companies who only want to recruit from
what they see as the "top" schools. If you don't come from that tier, you are
locked out of many, many opportunities -- you can be better at your job than
most but without the ivy league degree you are nothing.

------
B-Con
The face that it _can_ be used as a social signal doesn't mean it is
exclusively used so.

> Online courses (and before that, public libraries) rendered institutions of
> higher learning unnecessary for, you know, learning. But the idea that
> massive open online courses, or MOOCs, will replace colleges is a complete
> misunderstanding of the purpose of a university degree.

I think the author misunderstands as well. Classic "if it's in a book then the
class is worthless".

Information is not the teaching. The idea is that a teacher can instruct
better than a mere textbook. YMMV, but there's no denying that having a pre-
planned curriculum with instruction and 1:1 Q&As inherently supersedes walking
into a store and hoping you can find and understand the right books _in
general_. Never mind that books don't grade or provide feedback on homework,
etc.

The problem is that university became a requisite for people who didn't want
to attend. Standards for what the teaching we expect of universities has
plummeted. That's why they work so hard to keep their brand. For the self-
motivated and good learners, MOOCs and libraries can replace big parts of
university. That's not for everyone.

> Despite being an intellectually rigorous institution, Caltech does not
> graduate many future elites. Alumni go on to be successful in their academic
> fields, but don’t tend to dominate finance, tech or politics.

A school exclusively for technical competence doesn't produce as many social
elite [citation needed] as a school that's not focused on technical
competence? I wonder why. How many of the financial elite came from mechanical
engineering background _at all_? It's a silly comparison.

Side note: Don't forget it's an order of magnitude smaller, CalTech has ~2,200
students in contrast to Harvard's ~22,000.

> Successful parents in the upper middle class can leave money to their
> children, but that doesn’t guarantee entrée into the social elite. The more
> reliable way for powerful parents to buy power for their children is through
> a name-brand, exclusive education.

> Jared Kushner’s father famously secured Harvard acceptance for his son with
> a $2.5 million charitable contribution.

When did people making $2.5m donations become "upper middle class"?

~~~
pmart123
These are all good points. Also, I think another point often missed in the
discussion around social signaling is that certain schools create a higher
opportunity for a reference check. Upon reviewing a candidate early in her
career, if she went to X, I know someone who graduated the same year, I can
ask that friend/co-worker what that person is like. I think this is especially
beneficial when someone doesn't work at a large company their first job out of
school. It is less about the school name on the diploma, and more about
obtaining an additional reference firsthand.

------
lordnacho
The xITs are known for doing math and science courses. Those kinds of things
tend to show quite easily who is putting in the effort, at least in my
experience. For one, you tend to get asked things that require knowledge of a
specific model eg thermodynamics, and very often you're asked to calculate
specific numbersa and mentioned very specific keywords. I've sat in tutorials
with professors where the other student literally did not know anything and it
was embarrassing.

Chances are of you found the number you understood at least something about
the model. And if you showed your working out, which is always a good idea,
you provide more quite specific evidence.

In stuff that's more essay based, the weak can hide and the strong can be
mistaken for middling. Essays can be long but still formulaic: talk about the
question, mention the main things people have suggested about it, pros and
cons. There's a lot of permutations of arguments that are valid, making it
hard to disqualify someone who has mentioned a few relevant things. But also
hard to make someone stand out, because people know the answer required is a
bunch of bullet points, and if you just fire enough bullets some will resemble
a smart answer. I've sat in essay subject tutorials that went perfectly fine
for everyone despite very little prep having gone in.

Back to the article, naturally you don't want to buy your way into a degree
that you have no hope of completing.

------
ksaj
I have a similar but different vantage point. I didn't go to University and
only took a handful of personal interest college courses completely unrelated
to my vocation. However, over the years I have _taught_ courses (most of which
were written by me) at a number of universities and colleges. These students
were _smart_ and driven to get where I was in my career, so I was continually
reminded of the irony.

On the same side of that coin, I also taught technical subjects for a
certification I never bothered to acquire. The students often asked why, and
my tactful response is that it would have been a conflict of interest, and not
at all that I couldn't see the value outside of checking off a box for the
headhunters... Too many highly certified people with zero experience and near-
zero skill, I'm afraid to say. Certs simply do not replace a good technical
interview.

I also employed a PhD for 3 months. He was brilliant but so stubborn and
opinionated I had a hard time justifying the expense of keeping him on board.
He could barely function and kept trying to steer the company. Thankfully he
eventually screwed up bad enough I had a nicer sounding reason to turf him.

------
pseudolus
The author highlights that none of the students attempted admission to Caltech
or MIT. Going further, I would venture that none enrolled in a science program
but opted for a standard liberal arts/communications program. If you tailor
your course choices such programs are pretty hard to flunk out of as opposed
to science programs where the moment of truth hits during the first
calculus/physics/chemistry exam.

~~~
bilbo0s
To be fair, if you ask the average guy on the street which is the better
school, Yale or MIT? They're gonna say Yale. If you ask the average guy which
is better, Stanford or CalTech? They're gonna say Stanford.

We, on HN, might think MIT is better than Stanford, but outside of the bubble,
believe it or not, there is an entire world of people who never even heard of
CalTech. A world of people who have no idea what MIT is.

There is no point in using something for conspicuous consumption, unless that
something is actually conspicuous.

------
thatoneuser
Of coursemodern universities are a scam. Maybe that's not true for a small %
of students (those going into academia, for example), but in reality I'd wager
all my money that the majority of students would not end up better in life
attending university than doing sef learning online.

Most students don't build a big social network in college. Most students don't
take away meaninful thoughts from university. Most students probably don't
even end up using the discipline or domain knowledge they acquired for a
significant part of their career.

If all universities produce for people is a piece of paper that says "this
person MIGHT be able to do the job you want done" (and let's be real - how
many people do you know got a college level job simply by flashing their
degree?) then there's absolutely no reason that degree comes with a 6 figure
debt. That's something we can cut down to low 5 digits easily. The problem of
course is universities only have the incentive to charge more for the same
product because no one's demanding they do anything of value.

------
MaxBarraclough
Much-needed Outline link:
[https://outline.com/WV9say](https://outline.com/WV9say)

------
Svoka
I'm hiring people like for last 10 years or so. Long ago I understood that
degree doesn't mean anything. Be it CalTech, MIT or school I never heard of.
Probably, because I'm not google and can't give away half a million salaries
to the super top notch high achievers.

For me degree is only an indication that person has grit, and dedication to
spend 4+ years on something rather hard and boring. Which is a good thing. I
can expect that person knows that sometimes work is a boring grind, just as
Uni taught. However, learning programming by themselves require quite a
dedication too.

I hire regardless of degree, but I do take a closer look during probation
period how candidate handles slower more boring tasks.

So far, I didn't see much correlation between years spent in academia and long
term productivity.

------
anth_anm
Ahh, a nice anti-education rant for HN to do the usual anti-college back and
forth. Bonus points for focusing on technical schools as good, because you can
actually get a job.

Ban the humanities, right?

I liked school. It was valuable. I have a better job because of it. I didn't
spend absurd amounts of money to go.

~~~
YZF
What about opportunity cost (re: absurd amounts of money)? Do you have a
better job because of all the things you learnt or because you went to school
and got a degree? Do you mean valuable as in it got you a better job or in
what sense?

~~~
reidjs
As someone who is happy they went to college despite it not directly helping
get my current job, I believe it was valuable in that it made me more open to
new things, better at developing relationships, and exposed me to different
points of view. Worth the financial cost? That’s certainly debatable, but it
was ultimately my decision to go and keep going.

------
saagarjha
> As any remaining illusion of a college meritocracy swirls down the drain,
> there remains one school where students are still admitted based on
> unadulterated academic aptitude: Caltech.

[Citation needed]

~~~
apsec112
[https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/12/09/why_caltech_is_i...](https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/12/09/why_caltech_is_in_a_class_by_i/)

~~~
pseudolus
I'd certainly take issue with the opening paragraph of the article to the
effect that "Older readers know how the leading American universities, which
had risen to world-class status by the 1930s and 1940s, were upended by the
traumatic campus events of the late 1960s and their aftermath." There's no
doubt that US universities had risen in quality during the early part of the
20th century but they were still outclassed by institutions in Europe in most
scientific disciplines. It was the advent of WWII and the destruction it
visited upon Europe as well as the massive spending on R&D during the early
stages of the Cold War that propelled US universities to the heights they
enjoy today.

------
lifeisstillgood
In my grandfathers time, compulsory schooling finished at 12. By my fathers
time it had risen to 14. By my time 16, commonly rising to 18.

I think we are simply seeing another generational rise.

And why not - human beings one big advantage is our brains - and training our
young to use that advantage as best we can is the single best ROI we can make
( _).

Will it cost us? Yes. Will it benefit us. Yes.

(_)there are many others as my socialist soul will tell you)

------
nilskidoo
Ironically, the current US Secretary of Education and her obsession with over-
funding unregulated charter schools seems to be building a future where the
only people in the country who will be allowed a chance at any education are
the ones whose lives are paid for regardless of not even doing the work.

------
pmart123
I think employers and graduate schools have raised the stakes around GPA to be
too high. Here's a thought experiment, should employers just punish
prospective hires who have above a 3.9 GPA without demonstrating exceptionally
difficult coursework?

To me, this is similar to Lebron James trying to go 3/3 from the field with 2
assists and no turnovers. Anyone with that high of a GPA in my mind did not
seek to challenge themselves through taking the most difficult subjects, i.e.
they maximized credentials over learning. Elite schools then become worried
that students won't get the best jobs, so they add easier classes to ensure
GPA averages stay similar to comparable schools. Overall, this produces a
worse "real" educational outcome. Companies should start asking interviewees
with a 4.0 GPA, "Why didn't you challenge yourself?" Medical schools should
add 0.5 points to biomedical engineering degrees, etc. I think these actions
have a much higher correlation to grade inflation than a couple students
getting accepted due to a large donation.

------
pascalxus
Truer words have never been spoken: "Forget Bribery. The Real Scam Is
Pretending That Degrees Have Value".

I particularly like their solution: Increase enrollment to point of where it
inflates away their value. The intrinsic value would still remain, but the
bragging rights will fall away.

------
olliej
Clearly this depends on the degree field, and the job.

Just because some company has now decided minimum wage jobs should require a
degree doesn’t mean a degree is valueless, it simply a stupid requirement
(like requiring 10 years of nosql experience or whatever).

And yes, there are degrees that have much lower economic value - and it’s an
idiosyncrasy of design that leads to identical costs.

But there are real cases where degrees matter. For example large scale
engineering - you want to employ people who know what they’re doing at a very
core level. So they need to have been taught those skills, and they need to
have a way of showing that they have been taught them, and that they actually
did learn: a degree.

For many things apprenticeships would also work, but note that most
apprenticeships do result in pieces of paper (journeyman, etc).

Do I think my CS degrees are necessary in of itself? No. But I learned a lot
while getting it, so it’s nice to have an public record of that.

~~~
A2017U1
> But there are real cases where degrees matter. For example large scale
> engineering - you want to employ people who know what they’re doing at a
> very core level.

There's no other way than a degree to prove competency here? It's not like a
civil engineer gets her professional accreditation and the next day is signing
off on a bridge, all their work is still thoroughly reviewed.

Take for example the bar exam, if a person can pass that why can't they
practice law? I find law perhaps to be the most egregious in gatekeeping.

A degree really doesn't prove much other than memorising topics years prior
and plenty of people come out of University quite clueless about the job they
are expected to do. A lot of the real learning occurs when they actually work.

~~~
olliej
To be clear, when I say degree, I mean any piece of formal paperwork that
indicates mastery of a skillset - in my first post I mentioned
apprenticeships, but there are all sorts of degrees, certifications, and
diplomas which all serve the same purpose.

Yes, but if you're an employer you want some basis for knowledge of
competence. For CS or whatever you can often look at their prior work, for
physical engineering, or chemistry, etc, there isn't an equivalent.

As for Law: there are a number of legal professions that don't require passing
the bar exam, so having a signifier of knowledge is useful. As for pass the
bar but no degree: I don't know enough about law to have a real opinion, but
it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that amount of education require to pass
the bar exam seems exceed that required to get the degree.

And you are right, lots of people come out of university who are completely
clueless, but for any position where it isn't possible to have a prior example
of skill and knowledge, you need to propose an alternative to a "certificate
of knowing stuff" that isn't simply a different form of the same thing.

------
_bxg1
I recently saw it suggested that college admissions should operate on a
lottery basis (beyond baseline academic requirements). That would surely help
with socioeconomic diversity.

------
purplezooey
_When something is both expensive and of no practical value, it’s clearly
intended as a means of wealth transfer._

Now that's an interesting thought, referring to ivy league degrees.

------
vidalaa
Educational institution scam need degrees. Educated degree holder want
recognition and be respected. No matter how he get the degree.

------
CzarnyZiutek
private colleges/schools should be nationalized.

