Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-hasnt-technology-disrupted-higher

by paulpauper • 4 years ago

151 177 4 years ago

kennedywm3• 4 years ago

Hard to replace traditional education's role as a class differentiator.

zarkov99• 4 years ago

That is exactly right. In terms of knowledge acquisition the disruption has occurred. Any motivated young person can get a world class education free of charge, without ever stepping into an ivy. But it turns out the main purpose of college is to sort people not educate them and we are only now realizing that.

8f2ab37a-ed6c• 4 years ago

Exactly. This sort of post comes up on HN at least once a month. Higher ed is a positional good.

You can watch MIT lectures, go to your local library, read blog posts, listen to podcasts, read open source. It's all free. But it won't give you that scarce resource of brand affiliation on your resume no matter how hard you try.

Whatever you learn is only one of the many components of the total package.

DrStartup• 4 years ago

Credentials

hammock3• 4 years ago

This. More specifically, if a school isn't accredited, you can't get government financial aid to go there

aurelianito• 4 years ago

I think that the parent says that while you can learn almost anything from youtube, it is imposible for other people to know that you know something you learned on youtube without a test.

twobitshifter• 4 years ago

Credentials can be tested for through examination & licensing.

hammock3• 4 years ago

We've already gone through an entire cycle of technology-driven higher education disruption... ever heard of an online degree? Many such online schools have made billions and lost it again by now.

Separately, the accreditation scheme upholds a high barrier to entry for disruptors. Specifically, a school must be accredited (gatekept by the US Ed Dept) for matriculating students to be eligible for government financial aid.

nradov2• 4 years ago

Is the accreditation scheme really a high barrier to entry? Several new institutions of higher education have gained accreditation in recent years. There is some paperwork and hassle involved, but we've got to have quality control to prevent scammers from taking advantage of students and taxpayers.

Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.

Turing_Machine2• 4 years ago

There is some paperwork and hassle involved

There is a LOT of paperwork and hassle involved. Also years of time.

It's enough of a hassle that some new institutions have found it worth their while to buy out a bankrupt school that already has accreditation rather than starting the process from scratch.

clintonb• 4 years ago

There is some paperwork and hassle involved...

Tell me you've never looked into tried to get a school accredited without telling me. /s

Accreditation is a multi-year effort, and institutions do not necessarily receive accreditation on their first attempt.

Accreditation doesn't prevent schools from adopting disruptive technologies.

Disruptive technologies don't matter if the market doesn't believe your degree is worth the paper it's printed on. If your school is not accredited, students may find it difficult to transfer credits or apply to graduate programs. Additionally, students cannot use federal aid—grants or loans—for non-accredited programs.

Is the accreditation scheme really a high barrier to entry?

Yes. Yes, it is.

rahimnathwani• 4 years ago

Yup, accreditation is a high barrier to entry.

Make School failed to get accreditation. I doubt Make School is worse than the worst accredited university.

seb1204• 4 years ago

Because governments make the rules about education and the curriculum. Give is slow and typ not at the tip of development. At the same time they need to get the trust and support of parents who all think they know better.

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

Perhaps it demonstrates that very few people can learn abstract topics such as math, physics, etc., without some degree of hand-holding?

d_sem• 4 years ago

We haven't quite cracked the nuance of programming human biological systems. Anecdotally, the stay-at-home learning during the pandemic was proof we have a long ways to go.

randomdata2• 4 years ago

It has. Decades ago. But this is kind of like asking why people still ride horses when we have cars.

BMc2020• 4 years ago

Has any country found a better way?

miguelazo4• 4 years ago

I think most other countries don’t think there’s a problem. Because their college educations don’t cost several years of annual income, compounded at interest rates double what a car loan used to go for.

giaour3• 4 years ago

Even in countries where college is free, students do typically give up several years worth of annual income in opportunity costs

throw6383878• 4 years ago

Enrollment is tanking! It did disrupted it, just not in very measurable way! Just the fact people are discussing and questioning value of higher education on social networks, means there is so e disruption!

And YouTube is far better than bored and underpaid postdoc!

kennedywm3• 4 years ago

Maybe, though I'd guess it has more to do with the realization that the debt isn't worth degree in many cases is starting to sink in.

miguelazo4• 4 years ago

Enrollment is tanking because of the cost benefit analysis. States underfunded education for a generation so that Boomers could have lower income taxes, passed along the costs to students, and their incomes can’t possibly make up for the debt in a timely manner.

kamphey• 4 years ago

Technology could very well disrupt higher education, but not completely tear it down. Just like Airbnb disrupts hotels but Hotels still exist and are doing better now than ever.

What the future of education looks like is a lot more fractured than we can see in the past. We might think of "higher education" as just a college/university, but in reality there are already alternative forms of higher education and those will continue to be added to.

Sure MooC's seemed like scams, but some MooC's allow a huge scale of knowledge transfer. And some Cohort Based Courses as well, now. I like how Maven talks about courses as "transformational" and not just "knowledge transfer".

I'm looking forward to more and more types of higher education in the near future. Retreats, Online-Only, Hybrid, etc.

thwayunion13• 4 years ago

I don't think anyone ever thought they sounded like scams. At least, I didn't. They just weren't viable replacements for a traditional degree program. Which is fine, as long as you're not a VC losing your LP's money on something that anyone who has taught a few times know won't scale :)

pcurve3• 4 years ago

The article's title is a rhetorical question with answer that ends in: "Motivation and self-discipline are valuable commodities, and an in-person instructor can help provide them."

miguelazo4• 4 years ago

Among other things. Like being able to clarify things immediately and succinctly instead of having to open yet another tab that turns into a rabbit hole distraction.

entropy2048• 4 years ago

In many cases, I'd agree.

However, with anything that remotely smells like it's close to the technology field? Any clarification you might get, is probably 10 years out of date. At best.

jncraton• 4 years ago

I believe clarifying things immediately and succinctly may be why the author mentioned LLMs. They have the potential to provide this sort of feedback. They are obviously imperfect, but for the sort of questions that many undergraduates get stuck on (code won't compile due to a missing semicolon, etc) they are already a great asset.

etempleton3• 4 years ago

Exactly. Graduating college proves a level of diligence more so than intelligence or knowledge. This is undervalued. Many of the smartest coworkers I have worked with were the worst colleagues. Intelligence and knowledge is only so valuable if hard work and interpersonal skills are absent.

marmetio• 4 years ago

I don't see how the in-person lecturer is the same as the personal trainer. The lecturer doesn't interact with you any more than a video (less, considering you can't rewind). Only the individual instruction pushes you.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

Higher education has as much to do with prestige as the education itself. Getting an online education is equivalent to saying you got a diploma through the mail. Maybe it's valid or maybe it's a diploma mill. You can't be sure.

There's nothing equivalent to saying you graduated from an ivy school or such.

Online education is making a dent. Some prestigious universities have an online curriculum and are awarding diplomas that can't be distinguished from a on-campus diplomas but they are the minority by far.

The way I see it. Online education should be a game changer in 3rd world countries. Yet, it doesn't seem to be. It looks like it really does come down to motivation and your ability to push your way through the classes.

unicornhose• 4 years ago

Many parts of the elephant: no motivation to work on hard things without friends, professors, campus, well-paying jobs, and high-status contacts.

Would be interesting to see MOOCs on daily stuff: cooking, gardening, cleaning & organizing, style, hospitality.

Or MOOCs around hobbies: amateur radio, photography, sketching, watercolor, dance, music. Here there’s potential for the tech to meet users halfway.

giaour3• 4 years ago

You can absolutely find video tutorials on all the hobbies and daily stuff you list, and in most communities you can find groups that will teach you informally for free or in a slightly more structured way for a nominal fee. Where formal credentials exist, they tend to be based on observed skills (like a culinary arts degree or certification as a sommelier). I'm not sure the demand for MOOCs is there for most hobbies.

There are some exceptions for hobbies with a well delimited body of knowledge (eg birdwatching)

svnt2• 4 years ago

I agree with parent — there is no prestige issue and other contributing factors include a desire for specialized community that is absent in later years, plus reduced ability to/interest in relocating.

While you can certainly get it for free, having a cohort and a badge that perhaps could serve as a prerequisite could benefit all students and all teachers/schools.

readingnews• 4 years ago

> I am the opposite of a handy person, and I had no idea how to deal with this myself. But I Googled. And sure enough, there are multiple YouTubers operating in the home appliance repair space with sufficient specificity and dummy-friendliness that I was able to fix it.

As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people... a mechanic is not a mechanical engineer. An electrician, is not an electrical engineer, and so on and so on.

His other anecdote of lecturer is a straw man also, as no one has done that for centuries. The idea of structured education (college) is to force you to learn ideas you would not normally learn, and have a guide to help you understand (the professor), and have those ideas organized in a pattern that aids the greater idea (e.g. taking maths: calculus, differential equations and linear algebra are not only necessary for much of engineering, but they help you to think in ways of solving problems that engineers come across often). This is one of the key problems with self-teaching, they end up not having the vast maths background to tackle complex mathematical problems, and then end up simplifying and making mistakes. In engineering, these mistakes can be deadly. In software, these mistakes can now be deadly).

WalterBright2• 4 years ago

The difference between a mechanic and a mechanical engineer is the latter knows the math behind it. The same for electrician and electrical engineer.

I asked the electrician wiring my house to not put the phone wires through the same holes as the A/C wires. He asked why. I said because induction will put a 60 cycle hum in the phone wires. He had no idea what that was. I fired him and did the phone wires myself.

When I had a house generator installed (long story) the electrician wanted to run the 12V battery charge line through the same conduit as the A/C. I said wouldn't inductive coupling put 120V on the battery charger? He had no idea what I was talking about. I was unable to explain it to him, and just worked with him to change the design.

Electricians know the code, the rules, can figure out the right wire size from a chart, and how to do things without getting electrocuted. Step outside of that, and they have no idea.

coryrc• 4 years ago

I think it'd be a YT engineer who thinks inductively-coupled 120V AC into an extremely low-impedance circuit over a few tens of feet would cause a problem, not an actual EE.

tdeck• 4 years ago

As an Engineer, I have had to explain this to countless people

Sounds like you're a tech person! I have a problem with my printer, do you think you could help?

willjp• 4 years ago

I'll bite. Haven't they? Is higher education about the material, or the order it is presented in, and the contacts that you make along the way?

You're right, there are certain types of things that you can learn quite a lot about on the internet - this is especially true if there is no prerequisites. It's my favourite thing about the internet, and I'll never stop being grateful for it. I'm a self-taught hack, but I have a very intelligent/fortunate cousin that went to Berkeley (granted for business), and my interpretation is that it's a contacts/prestige thing. The information is mostly available elsewhere.

I'm curious to see where this discussion goes.

Hermitian9094• 4 years ago

I've worked in the ed-tech space for years and am good friends with many of the early pioneers.

Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors. I'll address the knowledge signaling first.

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this. Thus, people use a degree as a first filter because people have a certain degree of trust that if you have a bachelor's degree, there's a minimum amount of knowledge you probably have. No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).

There are then other signals that traditional universities provide. Graduating from Stanford not only implies knowledge, it implies that you are some combination of affluent, disciplined, hard working, and smart due to the exclusivity of the admissions process. Ed-tech cannot presently reproduce this without "climbing the ranks" so to speak, siphoning off students from the same people with a better value proposition (which it does not currently have).

maegul2• 4 years ago

Absolutely agree. And because of this, any fantasies from tech of easily disrupting education look rather naive … almost like they’re still in the mindset of the student trying to prove their intelligence.

It seems then that the technical challenge is certification/assessment. Here, AI could play a role. If a machine can interactively and dynamically have a “conversation” with a person, that is randomised/unique and responsive to the student, all to assess how much they understand a topic, that’d probably do it. Combine it with a certain degree of oversight and random checking and provisions for review/appeal from “actual experts”, and you’d still have something that should scale pretty well beyond the university monopoly.

An additional factor is the importance of cultural/mainstream perception. There’s a lot of “hacking” or gaming of the university assessment system, especially if you contrast the reality with the lofty and important goals of education and edification. I’d be interested to know how many, having gone through the system, really put that much faith in the quality of the “certificate”. I’ve certainly heard stories of some people/institutions wishing to also look at high school or secondary college results because they’re less likely to be “gamed” (though I have no idea how common at all this is).

analog313• 4 years ago

Assessment is a minor technical challenge, but finding people to assess might be a bigger challenge. Outside of possibly a small handful of fields (computer programming), we don't know how many people can actually learn an academic subject in any depth on their own. Everything is speculation unless that number can be nailed down.

A more likely use of AI would be to expand the candidate pool by changing the nature of the jobs that are being hired for. An example is the automation of engineering calculations by high level software such as CAD.

I've gone through the system. I wouldn't hire someone based on their credentials alone. On the other hand, a person who gets through the "weeder" courses in engineering or the physical sciences at the state university, but is outright faking it, would be a black swan event, not worth planning for.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

No one in ed-tech has built a tool that gives that confidence. Online universities have no pre-existing weight, and it is trivial to imagine hiring someone to do the work for you (this may now also be possible in university, but until that becomes a widespread notion it won't matter for this problem).

State schools have a really unique potential here. There are many now that will confer an on-campus bachelors diploma for 100% remote degrees. The coursework is equally rigorous, administered by a single professor with small class sizes, and the exams are proctored. Any attempt at cheating can be easily snuffed out in this environment. MOOCs are a dead end in terms of providing this. But a state school is a respectable degree and I really hope they’ll extend this to STEM subjects soon.

thwayunion13• 4 years ago

Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors.

IMO, this is an extreme bias in the Ed VC community and explains how they managed to flush so much cash down the toilet. In no particular order:

1. Tech focus. Most SWEs do not need a CS or even SE degree, and even if you do need that knowledge it really can be learned by hacking at things alone in a room. This ranges between "a lot less true" and "hilariously out of touch" in a lot of other fields.

2. The startup founder set skews toward the "independent learner" type.

3. Within VC/founder world, it's often actually true that university was for networking and prestige. This is one of my huge "you are so close to understanding how unreasonably BS your world is" pet peeves. Not everyone graduates from Stanford. The majority of college graduates attended colleges and universities that you've never even heard of. There are several thousand of institutions of higher education in the US. How many can you name? Sometimes I really want to say to EdTech founders/VCs: "just because you are incompetent and survive on your fancy Stanford degree despite knowing nothing doesn't meant that's true of all College degrees." (But not you in particular, of course, and this is just my inner narrative frustration... I don't mean it to be an attack on anyone in particular.)

Most students really do need years of in-person learning that does not scale well.

Most institutions provide very little signalling value.

Most of higher ed is completely misunderstood by a set of Standford grads gambling with more money than most institutions have in their endowment.

And I'm highly suspicious of counter-narratives from anyone who hasn't taught Calc II at the branch campus of a state university system.

American institutions of higher education, particularly the non-elite private ones, have been capturing value from actually teaching people useful things for two centuries. It's hard, it won't make anyone a billionaire, and we should get back to the old model of doing things not-for-profit in an unscalable way and without federal debt subsidies. Where by "capturing value" we mean "updating aging buildings and paying faculty enough to live a normal middle class life", not "supporting a massive administrative apparatus" and certainly not "buying yachts for LPs".

edit: various typos. Typed while in a meeting (about this very topic, as it happens)

HDThoreaun3• 4 years ago

Most institutions provide very little signalling value.

Signalling is the most important thing universities provide. The vast majority of jobs that require a degree don't require or care about what you learned. They just want someone who is able to get into university and pass with good enough grades. That's the entire value. Even community colleges provide large amounts of signalling value in that you dedicated a significant portion of your life to obtaining the degree, something many people legitimately are unable to do. Startup education has no signalling power because employers don't know about it and don't believe it is difficult to obtain the degree.

etempleton3• 4 years ago

You are both right, honestly.

Much of the value of higher education as it is structured is the credentialing and the networking. Everyone knows what a bachelors is, a master’s is, a doctorate is. This is important. It means something.

However you are also right that education works in person for a lot of people and there are a lot of values there. Community colleges are an under utilized resource to learn.

Making money by educating people is a bad business. It is expensive and time consuming and the more you try to cut expenses the worse the education gets. Non-profit is the right model for it.

If you really want to make money off the back of education build something useful for colleges and universities. They are big complex organizations with specialized needs where off the shelf solutions don’t cut it and there are enough of them to make a nice business out of if you come up with a solution that is dramatically better than what is out there. A lot of the technology solutions that are used barely work but there are few options.

edgefield• 4 years ago

As an aside, what if the “administrative apparatus” is as important as the academics? In SaaS companies, are sys admins and security engineers less important than the product developers? How important are the networking staff or the staff that handle backups? In higher ed, the administrative apparatus includes a myriad of critical functions and basic infrastructure such as advising, career services, mental health counseling, the registrar (course registration, transcripts), food services, the dormitories, building maintenance, cleaning services, IT, campus police, and on and on. Large universities are basically small cities.

Hermitian9094• 4 years ago

Most institutions provide very little signaling value.

I don't think this is true.

Most universities' signaling value is from the fact that they are accredited universities. They draw their signaling power for the institution of the university, maintained in part by the department of education.

While I haven't checked recently if this survived, in the 2010s several universities offered their courses online and offered certificate of completion for $50-$300 per course. These kinds of programs fizzled because even if students did learn the material the certificates did not sufficiently signal to employers that the student had learned it. A friend of mine from one of these universities did an internal study showing that of those students who completed the equivalent of a bachelor's degree almost none found employment in their field. This result should be surprising if we think low tier universities have no signaling power.

On a more conciliatory note; I generally agree VC ed-tech has been a boondoggle for similar reasons - a combination of misunderstanding education and realizing that no other part of education is monetizable enough to produce the kind of returns VCs want (barring certain extra-ordinary tech innovations that have not been forthcoming e.g. strong AI)

nradov2• 4 years ago

Doesn't that depend on the field of study? There is a fairly straightforward path for a motivated student to self-study to the equivalent of a Bachelor's degree in mathematics. But how would that work in, let's say, history? I took a fair number of history courses as electives and if I had just read books and watched videos I think I would have come away with a really skewed and incomplete education. Class discussions with instructors and peers gave me a much better perspective on many topics.

armchairhacker2• 4 years ago

It may be useful to expand proctoring centers, and provide online universities where many exams are taken in-person and a lot of the grade is determined by assignments that can't easily be faked/cheated (e.g. randomly-generated questions, projects)

Universities have pre-existing weight and "old money" recognition, but there's nothing inherently more "reliable" about them than online. A lot of people cheat in college, a lot of people take courses with inflated grades or courses which teach old concepts, and then have to learn everything again when they get their first job. It's absolutely true that if someone has a degree from a reputable college they very likely know their field, but if someone has an degree from a "reputable" online college then they also very likely know their field.

It's not fair that in order to prove "acquired knowledge" you need to pay over $10K per semester and travel to an expensive college. It would be nice if we start to see people from online universities succeed in the workforce and build great things, then online degrees would likely be accepted more.

rdtwo3• 4 years ago

Random does not prevent cheating. Cheating happens because students know the problem style ahead of time. It’s like doing leet code, vs knowing the question and then redoing it with a slightly different question

syzarian4• 4 years ago

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is…

With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth. HN comments are littered with examples of educated people in one area making foolish comments in other areas with those people thinking they are actually making insightful comments. Without training most peoples’ capacity to understand why what they think they know is wrong when it is pointed out to them is quite low. The classroom is much better at transmitting how to think about a subject than reading a book or even watching a video lecture.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2021/...

makeitdouble• 4 years ago

You could replace "self-study" with "manage your own learning resources" and include in that in-person private teachers, one to one online lesson, library talks, workgroups etc.

Parent is talking about textbooks, but it doesn't have to be limited to that and you'd still have the "tells us in three sentences how educated you are" problem.

I also think it's an interesting "problem", if you'd try to evaluate how knowledgeable someone would be after listening to economic audiobooks for a decade for instance.

Hermitian9094• 4 years ago

With the exception of a small percent of the population this isn’t true. Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth

I don't disagree, but didn't feel the nuance added meaningful information to my post.

Most of these people also are unlikely to complete an online course - ed tech has a hard time reproducing the "social pressure" aspect of education. It's worth noting that there's also a larger population of people who've achieved a bachelor's level of competence through study + work e.g. my experience is that it's not that rare for certain types of technicians to study to the level of an Electrical Engineering degree and no real effort is made to recognize that expertise.

rrrrrrrrrrrr27• 4 years ago

In social science and humanities, I agree with you that self studying is an uphill battle. You'll just sound naive unless (1) you've made a herculean effort in studying, and (2) you've thought very critically on your own about how you will assimilate and where you will fit into the existing space of thought. There are no definitively correct opinions in these fields but plenty of influential people have theories. My experience is that it's all about how you convince others to join your "team", whether what you say is appropriate and within the Overton window, whose "side" are you on, etc. In some sense the thing that is "taught" is how to argue, what's acceptable to think, and who is on whose side or not. And the punishment for saying the "wrong" thing is more severe than in mathematized fields.

Textbooks and/or (current) edtech are not going to be effective there.

But in hard scientific topics (mathematics, algorithms, engineering) there are facts and ideas that are taught, and it's equally easy or hard to learn from prose as it is from listening. In my experience you can be very effective self-studying as long as you already have basic background about the field and what's the point. I skipped 2-3 years of math in school by simply reading the textbook over the summer, doing the exercises, and just asking to skip to the next class. You do this a few times and then you realize that in-person classes are also just them reading the textbook to you. I don't regret it whatsoever.

I'd argue the difference is how mathematized a field is, probably along the same lines as SMBC:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/1483460468-20170103.png

lordnacho• 4 years ago

It's the same as you can get more fit by exercising and eating right on your own. All the material resources you need are there, but you need to add some personal behaviour to do it.

toss1• 4 years ago

>Most people don’t have the ability, patience, wherewithal to self study a topic in depth.

Yup. Plus, it's best suited for certain types of topics, and even then it's tough.

My college had one intro-level Logic course in the Philosophy dept that was entirely self-study. Get the books, study, take a series of tests (limit 1/day), each one as many times as you liked until you passed and moved to the next test. Each test bumped you 1/3 grade (e.g., from C to C+), and you could in theory pass the whole course with an A+ in 21 days into the term, especially by studying ahead of the term.

Reality was that hardly anyone actually ever did that, and this was a competitive Ivy League school. I took the course, prepped ahead, but still not to what I'd hoped, and it took me much longer than the 21 days to get the A+. It was actually a very good course and method of learning, but perhaps one of the things I learned best is that self-paced learning, especially in a rigorous sense, is far harder than it seems before we try it.

m463• 4 years ago

What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?

in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.

is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful? And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.

Hermitian9094• 4 years ago

What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?

The best predictor of being able to apply knowledge is better mastery of that knowledge and the context in which you are applying it, e.g. to be a creative mathematician you must know some things relating to the problems you're solving deeply.

is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful

Most companies use the following signals

1. A track record of success

2. Intelligence

3. Consentiousness - the willingness to do required work even if you don't want to

4. Stress tolerance

This is somewhat unsatisfying. One would hope you'd also try to detect attitudes or ideologies that blind you to entire solution spaces or being a massive jerk and alienating people around you.

TeMPOraL3• 4 years ago

What about signaling of not just acquired knowledge, but the ability to apply it in a meaningful way?

You survived the 3-5 year ordeal and got your BSc or MSc, this implies you can apply some knowledge in some way.

in other words - education and what it measures (grades) may or may not correlate with a successful person.

The signal universities provide is not perfect, or even very strongly correlated with anyone's ability to excel in a specific domain. But it is somewhat positively correlated, which means using it as employment filter will weed out more bad than good candidates, which makes hiring cheaper and less risky. In other words: however bad the correlation is, it's already good enough to be useful.

is there a way to measure or predict if a person is or will be successful?

I worry this is an anti-inductive problem: i.e. if you can measure the right factors and predict if a person will be successful accurately enough, you can make people successful (look at it as closed-loop control problem) - but it's most likely cheaper to just make them seem successful instead. The measure becomes a target, and so eventually will cease to become a good measure.

(In a sense, BSc and MSc titles are suffering from just that. They're no longer anywhere as strong a signal than they were 50 years ago.)

And this isn't just for hiring, it is also part of a good feedback loop for helping people get an education.

Unfortunately, the two goals - teaching for economic prospects, and educating for a rich and successful life in a more general sense - are at odds with each other.

julianeon• 4 years ago

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks but it is very difficult to verify in a reasonable amount of time whether someone has done this

I challenge this. In fact I've wondered why people don't devise a test that capitalizes on this.

Some edtech company should make a test - let's call it "the Genius test" - that's so hard it would challenge Terence Tao. I mean, why not? You have the whole world of possible test takers, anyone with access to a computer. If you make the incentives good enough, you can attract a million people to take your test.

So this is your class population; now weed them out.

Include International Math Olympiad questions on there. Partial differential equations. Algorithms. Quantum mechanics questions. Every hard question you can imagine should be on this test.

Then make the reward something like a full ride to an Ivy, or a strong state school, or a group of them.

You'll probably only have a hundred people with decent scores on it; and it will be so immediately obvious that they cheated if you call them up and ask them to explain a single answer, most fraudsters won't try.

Seems like a good model to me. I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.

TeMPOraL3• 4 years ago

Look at this from the perspective of the participants of your test: you're asking them to play in a lottery, whose odds are one to million, and the price of admission is years of long, hard work.

No thanks, anyone capable of solving even the easiest of your tests will know they're better off playing the actual lottery, and spending the rest of the time on any kind of job or social activity. You'd have to offer something truly out of this world, like guaranteed UBI for the winner and their whole family, two generations back and two generation ahead, for it to be worth the risk.

But then, with incentives that strong, you'll probably have only fraudsters getting close to the finish line. Unfortunately, the deck is already stacked against higher education here: as long as your long-term economic prospects hinge directly on your educational performance, the most motivated and effective crowd will be cheaters. If you weed out people based on performance, you'll end up selecting for cheaters, and against honest students.

MagnumOpus• 4 years ago

I'm surprise it hasn't been tried.

It has? You are describing every centralised college admissions exam, from the Chinese NCEE ("gaokao") to the Indian JEE-A or the French concours for admission to the better universities...

Spooky23• 4 years ago

Come on man, you’ve summoned the Stanford people who, like vegans, need to tell us why us peasants just don’t understand.

germinalphrase• 4 years ago

This base signaling of “minimal viable education” should really lead toward an assessment creation tool that would capture (and then reduce the necessity of) - the massive redundant labor of assessment content creation by educators. A significant portion of the content taught has been assessed a million different times. Much of that assessment content is locked up on static documents making reuse laborious. So - solve the educator’s pain point by allowing me to create an appropriately tailored set of assessment items instantly, curate items rapidly, and proctor the assessment immediately. US states spend something like 1-2 billion/yr on standardized testing. If(!) the veracity of the assessments can be established, move onto chopping the legs of the college board in an innovator’s dilemma situation by providing a lower cost ‘minimal viable education’ credential. Try to reduce the cost and necessity of low value higher education by reducing the perceived value of their credentialing abilities.

hammock3• 4 years ago

It has been possible for a century to self-study to the equivalent of a bachelor's degree using textbooks

That is not the point of a liberal higher education, though.

Historically (for much longer than a century) people were tutored k-12 in their own homes, with their families and neighbors, and not in these government-run public schools. You could learn whatever you wanted from books at home, and a governess and key instructors.

Still, you were sent off to college at a certain age, to be finished as either a man or a woman at a place like Harvard or a women’s college. The purpose was not principally to teach you math or anthropology that you couldn’t otherwise learn yourself (though you would learn some math and anthropology). There was another purpose

MandieD• 4 years ago

"... and a governess and key instructors."

If your family was wealthy enough for you to be economically inactive as a youth, and to pay for said governess and instructors.

Higher education was for the rich, too. As you said, a different purpose, mostly social (definitely social for the wealthy young women).

All those little, often church-supported, colleges and land-grant state universities and teachers' colleges that sprang up all over the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? That was a revolution: higher education for the non-rich, and mostly for practical purposes.

soferio• 4 years ago

As for signalling, “The Case Against Education” by Bryan Caplan is a crisply argued case that signalling is >50% at least of what is going on.

rrrrrrrrrrrr27• 4 years ago

My coworkers were talking about this at lunch the other day. An experienced tech guy asked all the employees there what they thought about whether a 4-year degree should be a requirement for tech jobs. All the new grads of course shit on their educations. A couple more senior people were of course more hesitant.

But college education does have value for most people beyond signalling. Whether it's worth $80K-$100K (depending on your state) I think is a harder question, but I definitely think it's >>$0.

I think the reason for this is hindsight bias, we don't realize how dumb we were before college vs. after college. Maybe going to an expensive day care where you are spoonfed super basic math and sociology or whatever is not valuable. But what I do think was valuable for me when I graduated 5-6 years ago from a state U.S. school was

(1) learning to talk with other people in a professional way,

(2) dedicating yourself for 4 years to studying one thing and becoming generally knowledgeable and mature about that subject, so that very little can surprise you, and

(3) learning self control and independence, and also how to drink/use drugs without embarrassing yourself. Valuable professional skill especially in tech.

I don't think (2) can be accomplished unless you take the initiative to go beyond the basic requirements for the undergrad curriculum. At least in math/CS, which is what I studied. But in industry, that maturity comes in handy especially as you're given loosely scoped tasks and you have to determine what's possible or impossible and then convince various manager types from foreign countries who are pushing back and sometimes threatening you. And as your peers whine and are weeded out, you see more and more how valuable that maturity is.

baandang• 4 years ago

I would say 90%. I would contend the main problem is we really don't believe in education as a society.

Most people don't even believe that becoming more educated makes you "smarter". "Smart" is this CPU clock speed you naturally have and then "education" is running the cpu through various benchmarks.

School is just standardization of the benchmarks so it can't be cheap and freely available. We don't want everyone to join the guild. As a society we want joining the guild to be as prohibitively expensive as possible while pretending we wish the guild could be open and free. All a racket and bullshit for 99% of the population.

randomdata2• 4 years ago

Most of the capturable value in education is signal of acquired knowledge and other factors.

Importantly, though, the topic here is higher education, not education. Higher education refers to a type of business. And the business of higher education isn't in the business of education at all, but rather in the business of socialization. The value proposition is exposure to other, generally like-minded, people in which to engage with and form bonds with, particularly with respect to mating.

While at some level something like this very forum could disrupt that there is something missing. Tech hasn't solved for the "human touch" and until then there will be value in stepping out into the real world. And so long as there is value in existing in the real world, people will pay for that.

jvvw• 4 years ago

Definitely. Going to university is also a very gentle way to leave home and grow up - you gradually learn to do things like budget, cook, find accommodation and so on while there is still support around you and have vacations when you can go home to your parents.

oneplane• 4 years ago

Because technology was never the problem. All it did was morph some things in to different shapes with similar functions and features, and that doesn't actually change anything.

Education in itself doesn't need disrupting. If anything, it needs stability.

nickthegreek• 4 years ago

It just did. It’s called ChatGPT.

wcarron• 4 years ago

And a sort of naive read on the situation would be to say that if we look at the people who are really strong, they show that inefficient, non-scalable personal training has been disrupted by whatever hobbyist forums or other internet resources they rely on.

I think this absolutely misses the mark on the two most critical factors. Number 1: *exposure to and interaction with a community of peers engaged in personal improvement in the same manner*

I can read Aristotle and Mills and Kant on my own in my living room; but this is not the same as being part of a book club (or a college course) reading these texts and discussing them. Finding positions, explaining them to your peers, perhaps defending those viewpoints, listening to others do the same, challenging them on their viewpoints, etc. These are examples of a secondary layer of context and understanding of a subject that is inherently not replicable in isolated learning.

I have a friend who deadlifts over 750 lbs. Do you think he goes to Planet Fitness and hops on the elliptical for 20 minutes and then goes home? No. He goes to a gym filled with similarly powerful, driven lifters. He discusses training loads, regimens, diet, etc. with his peers. The knowledge transfer between skilled practitioners is critical to master of a craft past a certain point. Sure, almost anyone who lifts for 3 years with even moderate dedication can eventually break 3 plates. But 5 plates? 6? 7? 8?! No, that requires something more: a petri dish for cultivating improvement; a community of similarly motivated individuals.

Number 2: A subject matter expert who can react and interact with you and your peers. Having a SME to highlight what is critical, to deprioritize what is 'cruft', to dispel or correct misunderstandings/misconceptions, to push the depth of the learning/training to a more advanced level; this is a massive advantage that in-person education has over impersonal, technologically-distributed courses.

Sure, some things are easily teachabale over YouTube. One of my favorite examples: Simple mechanical work. I've used YouTube multiple times to supplement my existing knowledge & owner's manual. It's helped me flush brake lines, install oil coolers, replace a water pump, and align headlights. Work like this, that is to say, work that doesn't require a high level of expertise, is easily transferable via YouTube. This is akin to taking notes during a lecture. More complicated work, like... say, dropping an engine, replacing the crankshaft, and remounting the engine is a task that requires a higher skill/knowledge base to perform correctly. I would not trust someone to do that with purely internet-based instruction.

Lastly, I would like to say that I believe scale necessarily diminishes the quality of what is being produced. You cannot teach 4000 students online as well as you can teach 400 in person; and likewise a 400 person lecture is necessarily a lower-quality educational product than a 40 person lecture & follow up socratic seminar.

armchairhacker2• 4 years ago

From what I see technology has definitely disrupted higher education. Textbooks, worksheets, and report cards are being replaced by Khan Academy, MyLab, Canvas. Teachers are doing less teaching and delegating more tasks to these services: assigning online modules, quizzes, and resources to help students (and this isn't necessarily a bad thing, as some of these online modules are really good).

I predict that very soon we will have AI tutors like ChatGPT, and then entire courses will be automated in technology. We already have "100% tech" online schools with one teacher per 100+ students or no teachers at all; but with AI tutors, I expect these schools will become much more effective, much more popular, and ultimately much more prevalent. I don't believe that the traditional school system will be replaced or that any public schools will become online-only: in-person learning is still necessary for many students, as are factors like free lunch and mandatory socialization, and AI will never solve those issues. But I do believe that fully-online learning, which is already rapidly growing, will start to grow even more rapidly.

And this isn't necessarily a bad thing either. Frankly, many people's public education system sucks because of lack of resources, and I don't see any alternative way that it can improve, because of lack of resources. For the students, a good AI tutor can be much more helpful than a teacher (and much more patient). For the teachers, it may be harder to get a "traditional" general-elective teaching job, but maybe instead they can teach small focus groups in special classes, where the teaching is much more fun and interesting, but also harder to automate. The state of education in modern society is awful and this has serious consequences (see: recent elections); a low-cost, effective teaching solution would be a huge benefit to global society.

sudomatic• 4 years ago

If AI tutors are not designed and implemented in a way that is inclusive and respectful of diverse learning styles and needs, they may perpetuate or even exacerbate existing inequalities and discrimination.

annyeonghada3• 4 years ago

Learning styles are a pedagogical myth and there is no evidence that they exist or that catering learning to and individual learning style improves said learning.

photochemsyn• 4 years ago

I have discovered that ChatGPT is useless for advanced learning, at least at its present state of development. It's often just wrong, often incomplete - not really any more reliable than just seaching Wikipedia for answers to questions.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

ChatGPT is horribly misleading and outrageously factually incorrect.

The next version of it however...

sharadov• 4 years ago

Universities have been around for thousands of years. Good universities offer a unique combination of factors - people of the same age group, professors and a distinct atmosphere that encourages learning. How are you going to teach science and engineering courses where you need access to labs? And, university is where you get a chance to meet people from diverse fields and backgrounds, get exposure to challenging points of view and build life long bonds. It's another thing to work remotely as an adult, where there are competing demands on your time, but I would never wish online learning on a young adult!

Turing_Machine2• 4 years ago

people of the same age group

Why is this an advantage?

jcranmer• 4 years ago

Universities have been around for thousands of years.

Actually, most historians tend to trace the oldest university back to the late 1100s (or maybe up to a hundred years older), with the University of Bologna being considered the first university. This is especially true if you consider university to be less "place of learning" and more an intentional community of students and their instructors.

paxys• 4 years ago

The answer to "why hasn't technology disrupted [XYZ]" is always that the problems in XYZ weren't technology related in the first place. The education system, voting/politics, real estate, healthcare... the list goes on. You cannot automate away problems when there are humans and human emotions/motivations/conflicts in the way.

Colleges and college degrees are first and foremost a social signal. There is no tech substitute to being part of an elite closed group and having a name-brand degree hanging on your wall. It's like asking why can't tech make Louis Vuitton bags more accessible to the masses.

On the other hand technology has absolutely disrupted learning. Information and skills are more accessible today than any point in history. Fewer disciplines need formal structured education and credentials. Ultimately technology won't "fix" the higher education system, but simply make it less relevant in the practical world.

RyanShook• 4 years ago

If cost is an indicator of value then the apparent value/relevance of higher education has only increased over the past 30 years. I think we are in the early phases of higher education disruption but it will be driven mainly by socioeconomic reasons. Is the current annual cost increase in higher education really sustainable over the next 10-20 years?

TeMPOraL3• 4 years ago

The answer to "why hasn't technology disrupted [XYZ]" is always that the problems in XYZ weren't technology related in the first place.

I wonder why one would want to "disrupt* [XYZ] in general, and education in particular. Disruption seems to me to almost always being a net negative for everyone except the upstarts who displaced the incumbents by literally breaking their market - particularly, the customers end up holding the short end of the stick.

Ultimately technology won't "fix" the higher education system, but simply make it less relevant in the practical world.

That is how technology works, which is why I don't like the whole "you can't fix a social problem with technology" line. You absolutely can. It's usually the only way you can fix it. And most of the time, the fix doesn't address the problem directly, just makes it go away by restructuring incentives that lead to it in the first place.

Thus, my belief is that the answer to "why hasn't technology disrupted [XYZ]" is that the technology the asker has in mind barks up the wrong tree. The [XYZ] in question isn't a fixed artifact you can sculpt, but an equilibrium of economic and social incentives. It's dynamically maintained, so pushing directly against it means you'll be pushed back at. You can make a small dent somewhere, then you run out of money or will, and status quo resumes.

EDIT:

Or, if you have access to billions of dollars of VC money, you can try and do it the hard way, to detonate a metaphorical nuke in a valley to reshape it completely. Maybe you'll succeed, but more likely, you'll just starve every established company/institution to death, and then still run out of money, leaving just a completely broken [XYZ]. See my previous point about disruption not being all that positive. It's what's currently happening in food delivery and private transportation, as restaurants and taxi companies are being outcompeted by unsustainable corporations operating at a loss.

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

Disruption seems to me to almost always being a net negative for everyone except the upstarts who displaced the incumbents by literally breaking their market - particularly, the customers end up holding the short end of the stick.

There's plenty of "customers" (students) who wind up holding the short end of the current stick, too. People who, say, wind up $50,000 in debt, and still didn't manage to get a degree. Or people who wind up $50,000 in debt and graduate, but with a degree that isn't worth that. Or even people who get a worthwhile degree, but still wind up $50,000 in debt.

That is how technology works, which is why I don't like the whole "you can't fix a social problem with technology" line. You absolutely can. It's usually the only way you can fix it.

Yes and no. You can maybe stop your gullible grandmother from getting so many scam phone calls with SHAKEN/STIR. You can't stop her next-door neighbor from pulling her into a multi-level marketing deal, though. SHAKEN/STIR may stop (most) scam phone calls, but it doesn't fix the gullibility at all.

didericis• 4 years ago

I'd go further and say most major modern day problems, of which ludicrous education expenses are one of the best examples, are problems that come from perverse monetization incentives and increasing disconnect between needs, effort and reward stemming from societal complexity and abstraction, and that technology is likely to make a number of those problems worse.

We've figured out how to increase physical goods and enable efficient use of scarce resources that can't be infinitely replicated incredibly well, despite a huge range of different emotions, motivations, and conflicts about how those physical resources should be allocated. I'd argue that's mostly because signals related to physical goods are relatively clear, direct, and measurable.

Things like "knowledge" and "skill training" aren't as clear, direct, and measurable, and when you walk up the hierarchy of abstraction, it's a lot more fuzzy and difficult to measure what you're actually getting as a consumer, what you're delivering as a producer, and what the source of problems are, especially if there's a major time delay and variability for payoff. That's the case with modern education, and also applies to "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of health care", "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of living space", "investment payoff in quality and effectiveness of public outreach", etc. It makes proper negotiation very difficult and leaves a lot of room for confusion and abuse.

One possible solution to this, which seems impossible/idk how this would work in the modern era, is to try to return to a system where a whole town would work more like a single unit so as to try to reduce some of the sprawl and complexity. Earlier in America there'd be a town known for making shoes, a town known for making lightbulbs, a town known for making steel, etc. There'd be a rallying, measurable "physical thing" the town could help use to calibrate whether it's healthy/allocating resources correctly. If the town isn't working as a cohesive unit, the central "thing", like lightbulbs, would get measurably worse. High school education is bad? Fewer competent lightbulb workers, fewer lightbulbs produced, clear signal. Healthcare isn't working? More sick days, lower moral, fewer lightbulbs produced, clear signal. Everyone in the town would have a better map of the intricacies of what's working and not working in that smaller system than they could possibly have in a global/gargantuan system, and they'd have a relatively objective measuring stick to determine whether they're working effectively as a unit.

RigelKentaurus• 4 years ago

If you use a different definition of higher education -- not as a college degree but truly incredible learning on a variety of topics, I think the disruption has already happened. Youtube has completely changed how I learn. The most amazing videos on philosophy, quantum mechanics, psychology -- it's all on Youtube.

analog313• 4 years ago

How good are you at solving moderately difficult quantum mechanics problems?

Maybe you're the exception, but when I meet people who've learned quantum mechanics from books, they've soaked up all the cool weird stuff, but can't write an equation.

Disclosure: I don't know how I would have learned physics without classroom instruction. I was viscerally interested in it, and in math, but didn't have the self discipline to do the work without some guidance.

bigger_cheese• 4 years ago

I have a Materials Engineering degree. In my 4th and final year I decided to pick "Solid State Physics" as an elective, it was a 3rd year course taught by the physics faculty it had no prerequisites listed and sounded like it was an interesting subject.

I was the only non physics student in the course and I remember sitting in the first lecture as the lecturer spoke a million miles an hour about Hamiltonians, Wave Functions and Fermi-Dirac Statistics. Almost everything he spoke about sounded like a completely different language to me and everyone else was nodding along to everything he was saying. I felt so lost. I somehow scraped a pass but in the process had to teach myself the prior assumed physics knowledge in order to do so. I would not recommend.

jldugger• 4 years ago

why have the past 50 years of technological change had so little impact on schooling?

A variety of fun reasons. First: it _has_ changed over time. I had recorded online lectures, grade books, course registration, etc. 20 years ago. The pandemic has sort of been a punctuated evolution for instructors, and IDK if we have any sense yet of how much will stick in post-pandemic education.

Second: the cost of education is sort of a feature. Biologists and economists use the concept of "signals" -- actions you might take to indicate your fitness as a mate, or as an employee. Getting into a highly selective school is then very valuable, and the return on education relies in part on school selectivity. If thats the case, we shouldn't expect the price to go down much over time at the elite schools; they control access to a valuable commodity that only goes up as population grows. A technology that allows a school to teach 10x the students would be disastrous for signaling.

Third: the cost of education at many (all?) state schools has been subsidized, and over the past 100y has been an a downward ratchet. Every time a recession devastates a state budget, the unis take another budget cut, but only rarely see subsequent increases. Often these cuts come at the same time the uni itself is showing record enrollments. Faced with a loss of funding and strong demand, school presidents take the action economists predict and raise prices. Which means, even as students are sent ever increasing tuition bills, the actual cost to deliver instruction is not so high, and in many cases going down. And since the return is so high on education, student take the offer they are given.

Fourth: the opportunity cost of faculty delivered education is high. You want a Nobel laureate to teach you intro level physics? Well, every course they pick up is a grant they aren't applying for. Better make it worth the department's time -- every research dollar funds more grad students and PhDs on those important "similar schools" metrics.

crote• 4 years ago

I think this significantly misses the point of higher education. By far the most valuable parts are 1) peer interaction, and 2) lecturer-audience interaction.

I learned way more from discussing the topic with my classmate during breaks than I ever did from the course material itself. Learning a fact is easy, deeply understanding it is not - and discussing it with your peers is the best way to discover each others' flaws in understanding.

In addition to this, people asking questions is a crucial part of the lecture. Sometimes a question is because someone was asleep during the previous lecture, but most of the times it was because a concept was not explained clearly. And in a few rare but valuable cases someone asked a question, and the lecturer's eyes lit up as someone had rediscovered an open research problem - or made a critical link between two seemingly unrelated topics.

Textbooks and videos can teach you a lot, but they do not allow for interaction. If you wish to simply get a basic understanding of a well-known topic, that might be enough. But if you want to truly master it and perhaps even contribute to advancing it yourself, it simply isn't enough.

wrp• 4 years ago

This is why online teaching didn't take over college education the way administrators hoped it would 25 years ago. People like Hubert Dreyfus early on explained why it wasn't going to work (On the Internet, 2001).

kmoser• 4 years ago

45 years ago, when microcomputers were first starting to be introduced into the classroom, they were hailed as a panacea for educators. The thought was that computer-based training (CBT) was going to help alleviate the teacher-to-student ratio by letting kids sit in front of a computer and learn on their own.

Guess how well that turned out?

whimsicalism• 4 years ago

How do I work around this paywall?

If not possible, is HN the right place to put it? Sites with paywalls that can't be bypassed are not okay on HN [0] cc @dang

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

wbillingsley• 4 years ago

If I recall, the overhead of running a university (the fraction taken by the central institution to run campus and facilities, versus the amount coming into the schools to pay academics) is around two thirds of the student revenue in Australia.

Although that sounds large, it's not in corporate terms. Charging the customer 2.3 to 3 times an employee's salary seems about standard. And universities are notorious for casual using work to an underpaid "precariate".

That suggests there isn't a whole lot of margin for technology to capture in the first place.

After which, you find that degree-awarding is a regulated activity in most countries, offered by public institutions subsidised by government loan and contribution schemes.

Tech has had a massive influence on higher education in the last ten years, but it seems to go via universities buying more systems and services rather than "University of the Unregulated Start Up" suddenly sweeping the public-controlled market for education.

blinding-streak• 4 years ago

College is not just about getting an education. An equally important part of a traditional college education is finding out who you are as a human being. Living with others full time, perhaps for the first time. The growth I experienced in those 4 years of college was unlike anything else in my lifetime.

bottlepalm• 4 years ago

People who don’t go to college also often live with others and don’t pay 30k for the privilege.

annyeonghada3• 4 years ago

University is, for about everyone who isn't in it for branding, about educatoon and getting a job.

I don't need to live with others to know who I am: I can introspect in my room and maybe use the money saved in rent to pursue something that really makes me grow as a person, music for me. The only thing that I learbed living with others is that living alone is one of the greatest luxuries.

pjmorris• 4 years ago

For me, this discussion brings up a question I've had: How well do the HN remote batches work compared to the in-person batches?

My hunch (and it's only a hunch) is that there's something essential about in-person learning that technology, to date, hasn't captured... and that's why it hasn't disrupted higher ed.

pbreit• 4 years ago

Easy: higher ed is all about the credential.

stephc_int13• 4 years ago

Knowledge acquisition is, in practice, a problem that is not well understood. From empirical evidence it seems that 1:1 mentoring could be the best system ever found.

With a tech close enough to AGI, it might be possible to have an even better 1:1 mentoring with infinite scale.

There are clearly unknowns and probably unknowns unknowns on this path, but the potential positive effects are too important to pass.

siliconc0w• 4 years ago

AI tutoring and hiring will inevitably disrupt education. A degree is a really poor heuristic of someone's ability to do a job and AI will be able practice mastery learning with every pupil (only moving on to the next subject once the current one is mastered) and precisely identify and drill where they are struggling. On the hiring side I also can't see the status quo surviving, it costs so much employee time to interview and it's done so unevenly with such bias and even with multiple rounds and committees you still get poor signal. This is fundamentally a classification problem. The proctoring and suggested scoring will be done by AI with maybe human review at the end. Hopefully these are opensource and using open datasets so biases can be challenged but I can see this also devolving into proprietary models. Well regarded AIs might give out a (cryptographically) signed certificate that you are x percentile technically and even behaviorally or even going so far as to recommend a specific role and company where you'd fit in the most.

throwawaaarrgh• 4 years ago

"why hasn't technology disrupted plumbing already? click here for secret thoughtleader predictions"

There should be a filter on HN to hide blog posts that are just technobabble musings with no actionable or definitive information. If I wanted my time wasted I'd troll op-eds in political rags. At least that crap is generic enough that I could have an argument in a bar about it. (or maybe I'm missing the point, and people in SF actually do talk about this shit in bars?)

hardwaregeek• 4 years ago

A school is simultaneously a community of young adults; a physical campus for them to live; a continuation[1] of a holistic, multi-subject education; a training program for a specialty; an economic, social, and political escape for many young adults[2]; a support system; a means to gaining a visa; and a way to find a partner and friends.

Most people go for at least two or more of these reasons. Even if a school is not ideal in a lot of ways, there are no alternatives that provide even a fraction of these benefits.

The only way that I could see higher education disrupted is by the government. If the government created a non-military service where young adults could work for the government, get trained in a career, while fraternizing with other young adults and getting paid a low but reasonable salary, perhaps that could divert people from university. Of course this would probably be mostly students who come from low-income backgrounds, as this service would not fulfill the requisite status and network building requirements that more privileged students seek. Which, now that I think about it, is also why a lot of low-income students attend college. So perhaps this would not work as well.

[1]: Continuation is generous. Often it's a necessary supplement to a watered down, propagandist, taught-to-the-test high school education.

[2]: Especially young adults who are queer, or who do not follow the political or religious beliefs of their parents.

toldyouso2022• 4 years ago

If governments didn't regulate who can work based on papers acquired, we would be done with this clown system of university and public school. And beware it's not that we have discovered the better way yet, we have just discovered that our way is inefficient and brings many wrong conclusions in science, goverments forbid us from developing new systems do we can improve. Technology made us find we are wrong, but investigating how to fix it require resources and freedom and these are seized by goverments

RunSet• 4 years ago

I hoped that by "disrupted higher education" the author meant something at least as radical as what this decades-old essay proposes.

https://citejournal.org/volume-2/issue-3-02/seminal-articles...

Alas, I came away disappointed. Instead of aiming for a quantum leap, the author only intends to automate the existing processes.

will_wright• 4 years ago

Right! I had a similar thought: the article appeared to be building to an interesting conclusion then ended abruptly... One follow-on paragraph could have easily explored autodidactic methods, through tools like youtube or open online courses, and how they have catalyzed an area of learning that previously didn't exist -- ie easy entry courseware is orthogonal learning model from the traditional education model.

IMHO, the only thing that is going to disrupt higher education in the US is a change in the federal student loan system. Otherwise, the money is going to keep flowing and those institutions will have little motivation to adapt to survive

edit:

Good article! Thanks for sharing

paulpauper• 4 years ago

As far as STEM is concerned, there is little that comes close to the rigor of in-person exams and problem sets. Certificates, MOOCS, bootcamps, online videos...just cannot match it.

pdntspa• 4 years ago

How presumptuous to assume that education needs disruption, I think the disaster that is forced e-learning and all the extra bullshit associated with MOOCs and anti-cheat would be enough of a signal to stop breaking things

yellow_lead• 4 years ago

College works great if you can afford it. For everyone else, some disruption could be useful if the cost can be reduced through it.

ChaitanyaSai• 4 years ago

What is education? What is learning? These are surprisingly tricky to define because they are broad.

My wife and I started a microschool (in Mumbai) because we couldn’t find any for our kids that were both good and did not require a multi-hour trek to get to daily. Taking up the responsibility of educating others’ kids meant we needed to articulate and clarify very foundational concepts. What exactly is a good school? What makes it so? As parents, we began our search with the “how”. We knew that traditional standardized age-segmented, test-driven schooling isn’t great. There is tons of literature on that. I also happen to have a PhD in neuroscience and have written a book about the mind, so I also know how little we know about how we learn. From whatever little we do, though, we know this current industrialized form of schooling is bad. And yet it’s been bureaucratized and dispensed with dogmatic confidence. It speaks to our resilience that we turn out okay despite its inanity. There are alternative methods that have been around for quite some time (Waldorf/Steiner schools celebrated their centenary recently). We’ve adopted one of the alternative methods.

However, the practice of actually engaging with twenty kids for hours everyday quickly made us realize that it is not enough to change or ask the how. A set of telescoping questions quickly reveal themselves: How? What? Why? To ask how we must educate, we must ask what is education, and why is it required?

Education is learning to play the game of life well. We must learn it because the game changes and we are not born with the tools and wisdom it takes to play it. We acquire them over our lifetime, learning about the game, about ourselves. We are learning even into our middle and late ages. It’s not just numeracy, literacy, or computational skills. It is mental wellbeing. It is understanding how we fit into the fabric of society and how we can navigate it successfully and profitably, and hopefully sustainably. Do you need school or college for that? No, but it helps to have a place where you can share notes and have experienced guides who are not merely transmitting information, but actively learning and exploring. That isn’t happening in most schools or colleges though. We are stuck with the unconscious definition of learning as information transmission and education as the institutional process within which this transmission happens in a measurable, testable, certifiable manner. Systems have been built around this idea and like all systems, these are tough to dismantle.

I think Generative AI’s greatest potential lies in making the transmission of information so effortlessly easy and effective (by personalizing this transmission to suit each individual’s needs) that we’ll come to realize there is more to education, learning, and the game of life than devoting over twenty years of our lives to getting graded and branded within these transmission of information tests and systems that empower them.

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

I went to an Ivy League university. Was studying for Biochem one year to meet a requirement. Class had ~500 people in it and no classes. You just go to study sections once a week, and take the tests. The study sections were all run by OTHER undergrads and the entire thing was run by an adjunct.

I ask one of the TAs (same year as me) - "Why the fuck are we paying so much for this education. My high school teachers put in 10x more effort." He says - "You have it all wrong - it's not about the education, it's about the credential and the networking that happens."

15 years later, and I finally realize he was ABSOLUTELY FRICKIN RIGHT.

pcurve3• 4 years ago

Just curious, Cornell?

LarsDu883• 4 years ago

How the heck did you... you're an alumnus too?

annyeonghada3• 4 years ago

Maybe that's true for the overpriced American University built on branding, but I've learned actual skills in University and the credentialing and networking has been meh...

Every time this conversation comes up it seems so surreal: paying for branding? Signaling status? Not for learning? Not my experience.

Existenceblinks• 4 years ago

It's a social problem rather than technology. If something signals higher social status, it will keep going.

est• 4 years ago

If we simply replace text books with iPads and instructors with non-interactive videos, then it won't happen.

Here's how it will happen: digitalize knowlege, I mean really digital, like how LEAN math cover nearly all undergrad math subjects in mathlib.

Make learning courses like MUD or multi-ending visual novels so learners can hae adaptive route of learning. The higher education won't be replaced until we hae complete single-source-of-truth in digital.

mclightning• 4 years ago

I think what they're really asking is; why tech hasn't disrupted higher education economically, with VCs, startups posing as universities etc.

because in every other aspect tech disrupts culture and higher education continuously...

darthrupert• 4 years ago

Because there is no tech solution to the most important parts of universities: prestige and networking.

spicyusername• 4 years ago

Pretty much every industry that modern technology companies "disrupt" is made worse for it.

Maybe we should start reconceptualizing technology's role in modern society.

SergeAx• 4 years ago

First of all, author confuses information and knowledge. Reading books (and listening to lectures, FWIW) gives you only former. Next goes knowledge and skill. I can cook a steak using YouTube video, and I can tell that I possess this knowledge, but it doesn't make me even decent cook, and there is an enormous gap between that and getting a position in a cafe on the corner.

Why hasn’t technology disrupted higher education already?

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