
YC, not Lambda School, is unbundling education - asciimike
https://medium.com/swlh/y-combinator-not-lambda-school-is-unbundling-education-bd6fdf0c78d7
======
lacker
In my experience (going through YC twice), YC is more like a replacement for
an MBA.

YC doesn't teach you the fundamental skills of programming that you need to
become a software engineer. A lot of people don't _want_ to take a risky shot
at being a successful entrepreneur. They would much rather have a stable job
paying them a six-figure salary. That's one career track that a traditional CS
degree provides. If that's your goal, YC isn't really the right way to go. You
are much better off going through Lambda School.

However, let's say you have some experience as a software engineer, but you
are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing code,
but also getting more into the "business" side of things. You're willing to
take a little financial risk for a more interesting career path. One option is
to go back to school and get an MBA. But YC is really a good alternative here.
You will learn a lot about business, even if you are the "technical cofounder"
and spend most of your time writing code.

~~~
kwang88
Agreed – and fwiw if this line resonates:

"you are interested in having a more flexible career, and not just writing
code, but also getting more into the "business" side of things"

I'd also recommend that engineers look into career switching to product
management.

------
mnky9800n
I am always concerned by the idea that universities simply exist to hand out
education. Most of the science, software, technology, etc. that is being used
by all these companies with people obsessed with disrupting education has been
developed, in part, by research laboratories at universities. It sort of feels
like throwing the baby out with the bath water. I always wonder how much the
"disrupter" knows about the university when they ignore all the things
universities do besides hand out undergraduate degrees.

~~~
forbiddenvoid
This sort of assumes that research can only happen at - or in partnership with
- a university doesn't it? Those two activities (research and
learning/certification) do not have to be tied together.

~~~
barry-cotter
Indeed, just because the research university has been a successful model
doesn’t mean others aren’t possible, like RAND, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research,
SRI International or the Max Planck Society.

~~~
analognoise
All of whom were staffed by people heavily credentialed by universities, and
who published in the same journals their University colleagues did?

That strikes me as exactly the same model, but without the teaching aspect?

~~~
barry-cotter
The research university, but without teaching, is about as different from the
research university as a horseless carriage is from a horse and carriage.

~~~
Vervious
I disagree. The crux of the university - faculty mentoring junior researchers
(aka phd students) remains in both setups (and in industry research labs). The
undergrads at research universities seem to be lower on the priority list

~~~
barry-cotter
Normal people think of the primary purpose of a university as educating
undergraduates. If the only education going on in a research institute is
apprenticeship as a researcher, possibly with some directly relevant technical
courses this is so far from most people’s experience of a university as to be
a different thing. Professional academics may disagree but if an institution
goes from encompassing a broad section of society to a narrow one, from
educating and doing research to doing research and education only as necessary
to that and from providing a space for maturation and relaxation before adult
life to being a professional workplace that’s a pretty drastic change.

A research university is a lot closer to a non research university than it is
to a research institute.

~~~
mattkrause
They're both on a spectrum.

Medical school faculty, especially in soft-money positions, might never set
foot in a classroom. Some of them will even have labs that are almost entirely
postdocs and technicians. This doesn't seem wildly different from a research
institute to me. If anything, the funding is probably less stable too, since
you're on your own.

------
mikekchar
This was a really strange article for me. I'd love it if someone would tell me
if I understood it correctly. The author seems to be saying outright that
universities are inefficient primarily because the education obtained there
has little value.

The author breaks down the value in terms of signalling (which I admit not to
understand very well), human capital (i.e. a trained populace -- is there a
more antagonistic way of putting it???), and fun for students.

Signalling seems to be validation of intelligence??? (I am SMRT)... I don't
know. He has a big section labelled "In defence of signalling" where he seems
to simply say that the 4 year wait to get your degree seems to be a bit of a
waste of time. The university can provide the signalling by just handing out
the accreditation...

He says nothing as far as I can tell about "human capital". Like an
education... I just get the impression that the author assumes that there is
no value in it... at all? I could imagine a followup article saying something
like, "Well, why are we doing this education thing anyway -- Just train on the
job! Cut out the middle man!" Except that he seems to want to pump Lamda
for... no reason in particular?

I'm just going to ignore the fun bit because it seems to be there simply to
make people angry. I guess...

Is this sarcasm? Am I intended to take this seriously (real question by the
way)? More interestingly, is this a popular opinion around here given the
front page placement?

~~~
barry-cotter
The author is assuming familiarity with concepts and a body of research you do
not appear to be familiar with. The fastest way to understand would be to read
Bryan Caplan’s _The Case Against Education_ [1].

The education system provides value by certifying potential
employees/partners/mates as being of a certain quality. That’s signaling. Some
of the quality is due to something the educational institute did, a treatment
effect. Most of what selective institutes signal isn’t treatment effect
though, it’s selection effects. Harvard matriculants we’re going to be
successful with or without Harvard and the signal Harvard provides doesn’t
distinguish much between them given the extremely low drop out rate, high
grades and low variability of said grades.

Human capital is what educational institutes add, what they’re supposed to do,
teaching skills someone somewhere cares about.

Given the amount Byrne reads I feel quite certain he values education highly.
Schooling he may be more or less indifferent to as a college dropout.

Lambda has a superior model for education as treatment effect in its very
narrow field to almost all universities given that the number that actually
want to train software engineers is very low. Job training is what people want
and they can do it well. This is _good_ because giving people things they want
and making their lives better is good.

As to universities and fun most people have a great time at university. Having
free time, not working, being away from home, alcohol, other things,
attempting to date, these are great. Many more people have fond memories of
university because it was fun than because of anything they learned.

It’s not sarcasm. Many people think most of education is socially wasteful if
privately beneficial because it’s true.

[1]I reviewed it.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/cua2dr/review_the...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/cua2dr/review_the_case_against_education_bryan_caplan/)

------
buboard
So let's strip education of its value in learning things (replaced by Lambda
or MOOCs) and its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what
replaces that).

YC is not so much unbundling the Ivy league cartel as much as it is competing
with it. Even though YC has a better track record in expanding its student
base (in response to demand) compared to universities, it's still an elite
institution creating a zero-sum game of vetting the "future leaders". The
monetary incentive is not really "negative", as it still costs for people to
move to SF for YC - and it raises the prices for everyone there.

I'd say both universities and YC have to be unbundled/disrupted. Presumably by
some publicly traded entities whose profit depends on the productivity of the
people they educate or vet (a publicly traded lambda or YC with research
divisions etc). Then the public can invest on entities that benefit the
overall productivity of their society instead of the ego of some academics.

Or probably a combination of both Lambda & YC: Education _should_ be free, or
even be paid. After all , it IS work. Incubators should be competing to
attract the best candidates to educate.

~~~
barry-cotter
> its value in teaching the various ethics (I don't know what replaces that).

There’s no need to replace that. Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make
them more ethical[1], and people who enjoyed discussing it continued through
the end of their worlds multiple times, whether the Greeks, Romans
(Augustine), Persians or anyone else who saw the world they believed in died.

YC isn’t in a zero sum game. They’ll certify anyone they think is awesome as
awesome. Harvard will only certify a maximum number in the matriculating
class, and they certainly won’t deliberately create competitors in that space
like YC did with Pioneer. YC does its very best to disrupt itself. It does pay
those it’s educating and there are technically competitors to it as an
accelerator.

[1] [https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-
call-t...](https://aeon.co/essays/how-often-do-ethics-professors-call-their-
mothers)

[https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthic...](https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/EthicalEthicists-150715.pdf)

~~~
grawprog
>Teaching people about ethics doesn’t make them more ethical[1],

Anecdotally, I can agree with this. Ethics class seemed to be more about
learning how ethics are vague and how they can be used to 'ethically' justify
even atrocious things. I really disliked my ethics class. Most of my
classmates didn't like it either. We actually ended up getting into a big
argument with the teacher once over something that ended with her just
screaming at us all to shut up, told us we were all wrong then just made us
read for the rest of class and wouldnt teach any more that class.

~~~
AnimalMuppet

      Took a class, big fun
      Modern ethics 101.
      First day learned why
      Ethics really don't apply.
      - Steve Taylor

------
baron816
Startup idea: unbundle the party aspect of college. That kind of social life
is not something you could purchase elsewhere right now. Figuring out how to
replicate it would be worth a lot of money to a lot of people.

~~~
philwelch
The problem is that the "party aspect" only works because it's bundled. "I'm
going to spend the next four years of my life partying" is not the kind of
decision that parents and society are likely to subsidize.

~~~
baron816
True. That format can’t be extracted in its entirety. But what kind of format
could? I don’t think it would need to apply to only 18-22 year olds.

~~~
philwelch
A lot of it is more valuable to young adults, who are still developing future
social, professional, and romantic connections. Once you already have those
connections, it's a fundamentally different problem--especially if one of the
romantic connections works out and you end up married, maybe even having kids.

And frankly any environment where you put together large numbers of young
adults will probably result in "partying" if they have enough time and space
to do so. There's a reason that drunken sailors staggering back from shore
leave are a centuries-old cliche.

------
bugsense
People here have a very narrow view of education. How HN is helping Classic
studies. Please enlighten me

------
jonbarker
I enjoyed this article but I find the people rejected by Harvard more
interesting than the ones who dropped out. Warren Buffett is on this list. The
people who dropped out after all always had an implicit invitation to come
back if things didn't work out.

------
Noos
I don't know if this would work because it just shifts the education down to
pre-18. This drastically benefits the wealthy, who can afford expensive
tutoring and natalist services that others can't match. It's hard enough as it
is dealing with people who have been groomed from youth to be the elite in a
culture that enables people to enter a four year college regardless of
background; i think it would be ridiculous otherwise.

------
shafyy
> _But as YC’s success indicates, there have been many hypothetical billion-
> dollar companies that didn’t come into existence because the founders never
> got the right introductions._ Your takeaway from this should be that if
> you’re very ambitious, the biggest risk you can take is to be a loner.

How can you possibly know that?

~~~
barry-cotter
You can’t _know_ but you can make inferences. If you are trying to do
something big and risky you should be focusing on the reason you think it will
work, making a big bet on your reason for being, your core competency.
Everything else you follow best practice or buy in best practice.

The more ways you’re weird the more ways there are to fail. Be weird in the
ways you are very confident in. Going it alone does not seem to be the way
most people win big so unless you have excellent reason to think you’re
different don’t go it alone.

------
ignoramous
YC might yet disrupt the Berkshire Hathaway model. Like other commentators
point out, it has a long way to go before it replaces higher education. May be
the closest it comes is replacing the MBA programmes.

------
pongogogo
I think this article is a bit of a stretch.

The smartest thing about lambda is they thought really carefully about their
pricing model, what's the optimum price and method of paying for an education,
if we're optimising for keeping student and educational institutions'
incentives maximally aligned?

I'm not an expert but I think YC answers the same question but in a different
context, with different actors.

------
paganel
I'm going to be that guy, but am I wrong on the fact that there's only one
woman in the photo depicting what it looks to me like a YC "meeting"? That is
compared to about ~40 guys that make the rest of the audience. That's a
depressingly low percentage. Are there any public numbers on the men-to-women
ratio when it comes to YC alumni?

~~~
buboard
Isnt that due to the success of women-only incubators who presumably absorbed
the best candidates leaving YC with leftovers (men)?

[https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-
and-i...](https://www.startupfunding.co/blog/31-top-accelerators-and-
incubators-for-women)

~~~
papln
It's not obvious that a women who qualified for either YC or one of those
other accelerators would tend to prefer one of those others. Women-only
acelerators may have some benefits to balance against some drawbacks,
similarly to how we don't see women largely preferring women-only colleges
over the best coed colleges.

------
juskrey
The simplest IT education truth: nothing can beat autodidactism and risk
taking. Schools and unis mostly benefit themselves.

------
hackathonguy
> Already, there are a few companies that have applied to YC, gotten accepted,
> and ostentatiously turned it down.

Can anyone shed some light into this? Why do companies turn down YC after
being accepted?

~~~
arcanus
A few reasons I've encountered:

They require founders to relocate

They take a non-trivial equity stake as the price of admission

It's a huge time commitment

Not stating that YC isn't an incredible program and a great value proposition.
Just that it has some challenges.

~~~
scarejunba
That doesn’t make sense. All these are public. Why apply at all if that’s the
case?

------
rkord
Startup Idea: A microlearning platform that unbundles _skill based courses_
and empowers the right kind of signaling (e.g. LinkedIn certificates etc).

thoughts?

------
musicale
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21341158)

------
keiferski
Welcome to the new and shiny version of anti-intellectualism: where the only
purpose of education is to get a job and the value of a job is determined by
how lucrative it is. Now scale that up to the level of an economy and you have
a basic idea of how we live in a materially-rich and intellectually-poor
culture.

In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the general
population, rather than their original limited participation among the upper
classes and very academically-focused individuals. At this point, the best
path forward is probably to entirely decouple "skills-based" (i.e. lucrative)
training programs from "education-based" programs. Otherwise, anything that
isn't economically-valuable will eventually lose funding - which has already
happened for fields like philosophy or literature.

~~~
black_puppydog
> In some sense, this was inevitable when universities opened up to the
> general population, rather than their original limited participation among
> the upper classes and very academically-focused individuals.

1\. Personally, I consider that step to be a good one. I'll put that off as
poor phrasing, because otherwise I'd have to assume you'd prefer it to have
stayed an elite game.

2\. I don't see how that was inevitable. The opening-up of education to a
broader audience _inevitably_ led to an "intellectually-poor culture"? I don't
buy that, there's a bigger story to tell here.

~~~
keiferski
Well, I would make a distinction between “removing barriers to entry” and
“discarding values in order to appeal to the user/customer.” I see the former
as a good thing and the latter as a deeply bad one.

There’s a difference between _allowing anyone qualified to attend your
institution_ _and_ _restructuring the values of your institution to match the
most lucrative market segment._ Universities today are multi-billion dollar
organizations that functionally treat students like customers. Ergo you have
academic values being slowly replaced by “is this valuable in the
marketplace?”

Everything is framed in terms of economics because the average person just
wants to get a good job. That’s understandable but doesn’t justify eliminating
fundamentally important topics like literature or art or philosophy. Thus my
decoupling suggestion.

> there’s a bigger story here.

Of course, but I can’t write a thesis on the past two centuries of western
civilization in a HN comment.

~~~
petra
If there's demand to studying the humanities, why can't the students pay for
it?

You can say that the state should subsidize non-wealthy students.

But why? shouldn't they, especially, focus on providing for their family, and
learn interesting things on the side, like everybody else ?

~~~
black_puppydog
Could you please phrase more clearly that only rich people should have a right
to self expression?

------
pinkfoot
Wait until you see the skew in the teaching and nursing industries. Oh, the
horror.

~~~
irb
Yes, it is indicative of societal issues that women outnumber men in lower
pay, lower status careers like teaching and nursing whereas men outnumber
women in higher pay, higher status careers like tech.

~~~
jki275
I would take strong exception your comment that teaching and nursing are
"lower status" careers. My mother, grandmother, and grandfather all taught
their entire lives and contributed greatly to society over the course of their
lifetimes, and a college professor is a high status position by any objective
measure. It's a position I would like to attain but never will because I
simply don't have the time to put into it, and even though I have a good
career in tech I wish I could follow in their footsteps at times.

Nursing also pays quite well -- perhaps not quite the level of FAANG salaries,
but six figure salaries in nursing are not at all uncommon, and relative to
the education required to get into that career it is a very good return on
investment. Also, nursing is absolutely not a low status career by any metric
I know of either.

You're trying to make a point, I get that -- and perhaps you could use other
career fields to make it more legitimately, but the previous poster has a very
good point as well. People gravitate towards careers that interest them -- my
mother was never going to write software because she has no interest in that
field, but she loved to teach and chose to do so her entire life. I love to
teach as well, but I don't have the aptitude for dealing with an academic
career.

~~~
irb
To be clear, by lower status (and I said "lower", not "low", very
specifically) I was not saying anything negative about those professions or
the people who work in them. I was only referring to their status within
society at the moment, in that they are not accorded great power or influence,
or feted in the same way as e.g. tech entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers are.
I think that nursing and teaching should be much higher status jobs than they
currently are and I think their importance is undervalued, which frequently
tends to be the case for professions dominated by women.

You mention college professor as a high status position, which I think
supports the point I was making, as whilst the majority of school teachers are
women, the majority of professors are men.

As to people gravitating towards careers that interest them, I think that is
begging the question a bit, as it avoids considering why people gravitate
towards the positions that they do. Are women more likely to go into nursing
than into tech because of some intrinsic preference, or because nursing is
much more frequently presented as an appropriate career path for them than
tech, and they can currently see a lot more women doing that than applying to
YC or whatever? I would suspect the latter.

~~~
jki275
Depends on the field. Many fields have more women as professors than men --
just anecdotally in my (admittedly small sample size) family more women have
been professors than men.

Nursing, to me, is a relatively high status field that offers a good salary
and a great deal of flexibility.

Maybe in the 50's we were telling women they could only be nurses or teachers,
but that's really not been an issue for a lot of years. There are plenty of
women entrepreneurs, and I know plenty of women engineers -- I've worked with
them and for them, and they've worked for me over the years. While this
doesn't fit the new narrative, I haven't seen anybody telling women they can't
be engineers or whatever else they want to be for a long time now.

------
pgcj_poster
From what I can tell, YCombinator has 3 main purposes:

1\. Teaching people that money is the only thing in the universe that matters

2\. Starting companies, or whatever

3\. Funding Hacker News

Well, in our modern age, we don't need YCombinator to do those things. You can
learn (1) just by reading Hacker News comments, and people do (2) without
YCombinator all the time. Therefore, we can replace YCombinator just by
finding someone else to run Hacker News. But as it turns out, there's an
innovative organization lobste.rs, that's willing to do just that. You can
read more about why we don't need YCombinator in this book[1], written by one
of the world's leading economists.

[1] amazon.com/dp/0140445684/

~~~
pushcx
Huh? Lobsters doesn't replace HN. Not just in the obvious, practical sense
that HN is 100x bigger on any metric than Lobsters, but also in a theoretical
sense, because our definition of topicality is a strict subset of HN's. And
we're not trying to replace HN. And we're not an organization, or even
particularly organized. If you think HN should be replaced... maybe try doing
that, rather than contributing to it?

(Context: I'm the admin of Lobsters.)

------
anovikov
This totally misses out a very important point. Colleges are hedge funds with
a school attached, and attached with the only goal of making the profits they
make on their endowment tax-free.

Not just it's about signaling. It's also a tax avoidance scheme.

This world is so broken, not surprising the richest and smartest people i know
never finished college (or finished a crappy one parents just forcibly sent
them to) and never officially worked anywhere.

And worst part of it. Startups are also the same thing. Why startups in the
"classic" (YC-sense) exist (or provide any advantage over what is derogatorily
labeled "revenue business"), is the historically ultra low interest rates,
which makes valuations vs EBITDA, which is an inverse of effective interest
rate, absurdly high. Exiting at such a valuation is whole lot more attractive
than just collecting profits by running a 'normal' business. And these ultra
low interest rates are funded by robbing next generation of pensioners by
printing money by the trillion: by robbing ourselves, just in the old age. It
is also zero sum. Also a Ponzi scheme. Also a scam.

And there is no escape from that. All the world of ours would cease to exist
if we one day stopped lying to ourselves. "Real" stuff ended with abolition of
the gold standard, and no one wants to go back, because it was too bad, and
that or Communism would be only alternatives. We better keep pretending things
are alright.

~~~
musicale
If you're going to slice up universities by financial components, the
university itself is a fairly large component (perhaps billions of dollars per
year for some schools.) The income for the university proper (from research,
tuition and fees, etc.) is often larger than endowment income. There's often
also a fairly large real estate/land management component as well as a
(basically professional) sports organization.

Universities differ from regular hedge funds in that they don't have the same
sort of investors. In fact, because they're non-profit, they can't return
profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or keep growing the
endowment.

~~~
anovikov
>they can't return profits to shareholders and instead have to spend them or
keep growing the endowment.

This is same as saying that they exist for the illegal profit of their
managers (laundering away the profits) rather than legal profit of their
investors?

