In a World Shaped by College Dropouts, Education is the Next Bubble

http://refer.ly/in_a_world_shaped_by_college_dropouts__education_is_the_next_bubble/c/181e0c4268d911e2bfbf22000a1db8fa

by kevin_morrill • 13 years ago

49 56 13 years ago

I'm so sorry. I know its totally off topic, but I just can't read those first three words in anything other than Don LaFontaine voice.

kevin_morrill• 13 years ago

This Referly page may be right up your alley: https://refer.ly/the_men_behind_movie_trailers/c/aaf97926603... The routine by Pablo Francisco makes me laugh every time.

On a more serious note, one of the gems in this page is the Art History series called Civilisation by Kenneth Clark. PG recommended this guy in one of his essays, and it's one of the best things I've watched all year. I feel like I have such a better perspective on art now.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

The post does quote one popular statistics aphorism, "correlation is not causation", but is sorely in need of another of them, "the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'". There are interesting arguments for or against college, but a list of a handful of successful college dropouts is not one of the better arguments.

chewxy• 13 years ago

Hey, don't knock people's dreams of being black swans. /sarcasm

You know, we're in such a society where it's wrong to knock some common sense into people. It's weird

randomdata6• 13 years ago

I don't see it that way. Anecdotes are not data, certainly, but the article really only uses those anecdotes to disprove the premise that education == success. Anecdotes are more than sufficient to accomplish that. Just one success story would have been enough.

He does go on to question if a degree could even be a liability, but I would suggest that the wording acknowledges that he doesn't have sufficient data to form any hard conclusions. I didn't take it as an argument, just a tangent on something that would be interesting to measure in the future that relates to the rest of the story.

_delirium2• 13 years ago

Sure, anecdotes do prove the point that it's possible to have success without education. But there have always been examples here and there; even outside of tech, you could become the next Keith Richards. It's just not very likely.

I think it's possible things are shifting (at least in tech, probably not as much in other areas) so that college degrees aren't as big a benefit, but a handful of extreme successes aren't where you'd find evidence of that.

freshhawk• 13 years ago

I laughed out loud at having the heading "correlation is not causation" right below his list of successful dropouts.

snoonan• 13 years ago

Selling most academic learning in a physical space makes about as much sense as selling information printed on paper.

aheilbut• 13 years ago

Curiously, information printed on paper remains the key to enabling academic learning anywhere.

drakeandrews• 13 years ago

I like my books, thank you very much. I've never felt fearful over my safety reading a book on the train. I've never had the sudden urge to put a book away lest someone try and take it from me. And it is still orders of magnitude easier for me to lend someone a book than it is to (legally) give them a copy of one of the many ebooks I own for a while.

In addition, I am currently at a (supposedly) top university in London. Everything in my lectures I could adequately teach myself with the books on the course, Wikipedia and Wolfram Mathworld. This isn't why I'm paying ten thousand pounds a year (roughly, including living costs). I'm paying ten thousand pounds a year to get an excuse to be around smart people my age for three years in London. I've met so many brilliant people in my time here and despite a brief period where I was almost committed to dropping out I ultimately decided otherwise (partly because I'd already sunk eighteen months and twenty thousand pounds into it, partly because completing it would only be another eighteen months and another ten thousand pounds plus a degree whose value may be questionable but if anyone can point out any downsides, considering the already large investment I've made, I'd be more than happy to hear them). I'd get none of these upsides had I merely done a bunch of online courses and read some books on maths and programming.

randomdata6• 13 years ago

I think your post accurately describes the problem with education today. I, for one, hate paper with a passion. There is not one redeeming quality offered by it, from my perspective. Obviously you take the exact opposite stance, and, importantly, that doesn't make you wrong.

As you have illustrated here: Everyone is different, but our education system only serves a subset of the population who fit that particular mould. We don't need to destroy college, and in fact it is important to keep it alive, but we need to recognize that it is not the only game in town. The computer didn't eliminate paper, but it did give us choice. Choice, with recognition of achievement, is what education desperately needs.

vsbuffalo• 13 years ago

But employers use diplomas as a signal[0]. The increases in the number of college graduates only further necessitates that smart people require one for signaling their productivity.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) Search for "sheepskin"

yarianluis2• 13 years ago

From your link:

"The informational value of the credential comes from the fact that the employer assumes it is positively correlated with having greater ability."

An often-cited reason why a lot of recent college-grads are without jobs is that they are not actually prepared for real work.

As the number of people graduate college, the meaning of a degree lessens. If everyone has one, then it stops meaning as much.

randomdata6• 13 years ago

Employers have used diplomas as a signal in the past, but signals can and do change, and I would argue is changing. I can't help but feel the recent UW announcement about allowing auto didactics to obtain a degree without the class time is their realization of this.

sonabinu• 13 years ago

Why does it have to be a bubble, if there is new learning involved at minimal cost? I feel it will just lead to a great disparity in learning amongst those who have access to the internet and those who do not. Not to mention those who are self-motivated and those who are not.

brennenHN• 13 years ago

While I agree that education is going to change fundamentally over the course of our lives, this article represents both a misunderstanding of the housing bubble and the likely path of education in our country.

Our community can be somewhat insular and we forget the incredible value that higher education provides to the job market at large, and as unemployment rates rise, the disparity grows and makes education more valuable, not less.

I had hoped this would be an article about the practice of selling bad student debt (debt from dropouts unlikely to pay it back) as a way to get around new regulations. Instead it listed the same, tired list of famous people who dropped out of college. We all know their names and most of us also know that the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs have at least their bachelors degrees, and that a huge percent also have masters or phds.

randomdata6• 13 years ago

"Our community can be somewhat insular and we forget the incredible value that higher education provides to the job market at large, and as unemployment rates rise, the disparity grows and makes education more valuable, not less."

Unemployment rates (or levels of income, for that matter) by education attainment are not particularly interesting, in my opinion. People who are smart and motivated generally go to college, so it is difficult to measure them against smart and motivated people who did not go to college.

codex5• 13 years ago

Argh, more bait from refer.ly founders. The refer.ly modus operandi seems to be:

a) write evergreen content that HN users are likely to upvote or read (HN catnip) based on current HN trends

b) fill content with paid referral links

c) post catnip to HN

dmor2• 13 years ago

you missed two crucial steps:

d) figure out what readers want and extend to 1000s of online communities

e) profit

How would you suggest starting a massively distributed publishing business with no ads?

azifali• 13 years ago

I think YC is a wrong place to send in referral links unless of course data proves it otherwise.

At least I am glad it isn't one of those "my mom started to work from home" ads :)

codex5• 13 years ago

Will members of these thousands of online communities also write content merely as a vehicle to embed referral links? If so, I'm not sure that's socially redeeming. It feels like a content farm operation. At least with legitimate ad supported sites the content is written before the ads (Google figures out what ads to serve after the fact). The content is may still be bait, but it's not designed to shill something specific, as might happen in a system like this.

rdl6• 13 years ago

I was actually really happy with this particular post. It had good content and well selected items.

I really doubt referly is trying to make revenue by posting on hn. More likely, it is to get feedback on product and design. People post links about their own products all the time, and the community is pretty supportive, generally.

After all, if you wrote a blog engine and blogger with it, and wanted to make a blog post to link to hn, it would probably be with your own blog engine, not Wordpress.

(I do agree that some of their "top 20 lists of random products" were kind of borderline; I'd cut them slack as a startup, particularly since dmor has been super helpful in the startup community (she mentors at 500 Startups, etc.). I don't really like her or Kevin's taste in some products like food, though.)

dmor2• 13 years ago

Note to self: get food editor.

You are right, we are using HN as a place to test different kinds of content. I hear every negative comment, I also get a lot of emails on both sides, helpful and hateful, and use that to figure out what kind of content is good. What I'm fundamentally interested in is answering is "what is good for X" - where X are all these different categories.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

The college tuition phenomenon is an example of a very weird bubble. Of the hundreds of well-studied economic bubbles, there isn't one quite like it. I'm fairly comfortable saying that it's impossible to predict when it will go down. It could happen next year, or not until 50 have passed.

We know that education itself is of multi-trillion-dollar importance. It's the difference between stagnation and growth and, for a society, progress and failure. How people think influences what they do. By and large, most people are underprepared for the problems and complexities of the future. People talk about the Singularity and Strong AI but, if you've actually read some corporate source code, you become a bit more pessimistic. 95% of paid professional programmers can't even write shitty business apps well.

So that's Weird Thing #1 about this bubble. It involves something that actually is very important-- not gold or tulip bulbs or stock in silly companies.

Of course, you don't need to spend $160,000 on an elite college to get a decent education. That gets to the real reason people are paying so much.

We also know that social connections matter for personal position. It's a zero-sum game and it's shitty that we have to play it, but if you don't get the "who you know" game in order, then you can't make use of what you know, and you become yet another bitter, smart underachiever. That's even more miserable than being a regular, ignorant person.

That's Weird Thing #2 about this education bubble: it pertains to a social need that many people feel intensely and experience bitterly. If those Ivy League colleges are delivering on connections, they're probably worth $160,000. Which is why they get away with charging that much. They could probably triple it, were it not for the image problems of drawing attention to the socioeconomic issues. (They wouldn't actually make themselves unaffordable at $120k per year, because they'd be offering a lot more financial aid except to the very rich. However, putting the full-price level at that point would draw negative secondary attention.)

The tuition bubble is about the social connections. Do not be deluded on this. Education is a secondary concern in all that, especially when we're talking about private pre-schools where the quality is ancillary: it's about the "feeder" effect. How did degenerate connection-seeking get conflated with education? We have a weird superego in our society that says that the best way to spend ages 18-22 is to live in a way mirroring how the upper class wants to perceive itself, as opposed to how it actually is (see Xoxohth for that, because while most of its posters are not upper-class themselves, they have U.S. upper class attitudes down). College, for most Americans, is this period of making connections that involves courses because of that ghost of a superego that says we're supposed to find those things important, especially if we want to run the world. (The actual people who run the world are uneducated, ignorant garbage, but I'll step over that issue for now.)

MBA programs are more brazen about this. It's a regular thing for an MBA professor to reschedule exams to accommodate student travel and social events. Top MBAs are the only educational program (to my knowledge) where professors are virtually required to accommodate students' social calendars.

So why is tuition high? Education is important to society, even at those ridiculous price levels. However, the price is mostly paid by the individual (well, parents) and that is because of the connections.

I don't think anyone can predict how this will play out. Escalating economic inequality increases the importance of social connections, which means that more money is going to get sucked away in the search for them. Expensive, reputable colleges are (a) the most socially acceptable way to turn money into connections for young people, and (b) a socially acceptable way to transfer wealth across generations. That isn't going to fade out just because we've found better ways of disseminating information on the Internet.

Don't get me wrong: online education is going to be quite powerful, and we're going to see some awesome progress in the next decade or two, but this extremely profitable (for some institutions) pattern of social-connection seeking is not going to disappear just yet.

mahyarm• 13 years ago

But how about the majority of college goers who know that they're not going to state college X to make connections with the rich and famous? Tuition for them has ballooned too.

zgm• 13 years ago

This hit the nail on the head. It's not knowledge; it's the connections you make that you're paying the premium for. Also, at least for the foreseeable future, a degree will still be necessity for most entry-level jobs. So while online education will continue to improve, old-school degree programs are a legacy system that will continue to be prevalent in spite of the growing cost.

stanfordkid• 13 years ago

I just don't think that's true. If you ignore "connections" with outside institutions the inter-personal interactions are where you learn the most. You are surrounded by peers that are much smarter and more determined than you and it tends to rub off. Also the coursework and materials are at a much higher level than anything you find online or freely available because of that peer support group -- that's why I think the extra tuition is worth it.

SatvikBeri• 13 years ago

To clarify-there's capital-C Connections, which have to do with old money and social status, and these are destructive. There are also lowercase-c connections, which is basically knowing people or having friends, and these are a major positive. Without knowing anyone the work you produce will actually be of lesser value, because you may end up doing something no one cares about really well.

As an example, I got into Machine Learning through connections about 2 years ago. If I hadn't known anyone I might have spent a lot of time trying to break into classical AI, I-banking, or programming. Instead I knew that Machine Learning was becoming more and more important, so I was able to focus my energy on learning that as opposed to, say, C++.

michaelochurch2• 13 years ago

This is a really strong point. When we talk about "Connections", we're actually often talking about information flow.

Capital-C Connections are about the ability to advertise oneself to a set of parasitic people with disproportionate power. As the world wakes up to this emperor having no clothes, this is becoming less important. Look at Mitt Romney's amazement at the fact people who scoff about the "47%" in private (in a world with smart phones and the Internet) can't get elected.

That's a push-driven information flow that exists in a time of scarcity. One has to advertise oneself to the few people who are in power. That has been the dominant world for centuries.

However, as we move into an era where talent, skill, and know-how are the scarce resources, the more important information flow is pull-driven. The game for an ambitious person is more about finding things out-- what's worth learning, what to work on. So you win by pulling down the best information, not by pushing (low-quality, biased) information about oneself into the streams of others.

reaclmbs• 13 years ago

"The actual people who run the world are uneducated, ignorant garbage, but I'll step over that issue for now."

Who are these people?

elliott99• 13 years ago

What if someone, like, wants to become a doctor, needs to learn pre-medical subjects? Self-study is better?

dougk16• 13 years ago

This is just a purely academic response to your question, but if you took me straight out of high school, and just dropped me into an apprenticeship-type situation in any medical field, I'm pretty confident I could come out just as competent had I gone through the classical college->residency gauntlet, and probably in a shorter amount of time. This of course assumes I have a minimum level of intelligence/work-ethic, a passion for medicine, and there were enough willing doctors going around to fulfill the demand for apprenticeships, but I think it's thusly theoretically possible to do away with college, although it would never happen.

dr_doom• 13 years ago

Yeah because the majority of college students are going to study medicine.

When people talk about the "end" of higher education they mean an end to the thousands of psychology, communications, liberal arts type degrees. We will still have universities and phd's but not kids taking on thousands in debt so universities can build massive new building and sports arenas.

randomdata6• 13 years ago

I don't think there is a better and we need to stop thinking in such polarized ways. People are different. Some people excel with formal direction, other excel on their own, and some people excel with all kinds of combinations in between.

barry-cotter2• 13 years ago

US medical education is provably inefficient. You can take a sufficiently intelligent 17 year old and give them a top notch medical education in five years. In Ireland and the UK Medicine is an undergraduate degree and takes five or six years depending on the university. If you got rid of summers off you could do it very comfortably in four. Making medicine a second entry degree is a giant waste of social resources.

dinkumthinkum• 13 years ago

Wait, I thought the college was irrelevant? Why can't the brilliant 17 year old just read blog posts or whatever people who propose these positions think?

Anyway, I'm going to address a different issue. ... You really think you take a 17 year old straight out of high school level education and in four years they are a medical doctor? That's interesting ...

bossx• 13 years ago

Without degrees there would be no employees to work at the dropout's companies.

yarianluis2• 13 years ago

Unless you are trying to make a snarky remark about college-graduates being taught how to work for someone else instead of run their own company--this is not true.

It is not hard to imagine a society where work is more collaboration among equals and less hierarchical. I.e. Valve Software.

Evbn• 13 years ago

In a world shaped by social media sites, blogspamming yesterday's HN topics is the next bubble.

mtalantikite• 13 years ago

Just want to point out that all of your examples are white men.

Higher education is still a great way for those who don't already have every door open to them to advance in the world.

nathos• 13 years ago

Not exactly what you're talking about, but you reminded me of this study I came across a few days ago: http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/news/unseen_disadvantage...

robryan• 13 years ago

As an aside, is it correct that John Carmack is a billionaire?

venomsnake• 13 years ago

Or maybe these "dropouts" were so smart and business apt that the educational system was holding them back.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

I have the luck of having IQ in the low 150s, I have barely had the need to to ever study. I can make up all the formulas, proof and laws needed for math, physics,chemistry on the fly. And these guys - they have way more raw brainpower than me, and some of them dumb luck. I suppose the Bill Gates was even more bored back in the time without lolcats to waste his time on.

So unless you can read 500 pages of detailed excel spec, understand and follow the IDispatch and COM while keeping the whole of the previous versions of excel quirks in your head in a few hours - don't drop out.

Of course the question why college is so expensive, while in the rest of the world is affordable is another thing.

kelnos2• 13 years ago

Agreed. Most articles that try to make the argument "these great successes dropped out of college, so college is superfluous" fail to recognize that these great successes are unusual people. Whether that means they were much smarter than their peers, were more tenacious or hard-working, or just ended up at the right place at the right time, these stories are not common.

By all means, if you're a Gates, Zuckerburg, Carmack, Ford... drop out of college and do your own thing. But for every one of those, there are scores of people who would fail hard, to their extreme detriment, if they followed that path.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

Ok, in a nutshell: There were useful things for me to learn in college. But, for me, it was incredibly inefficient.

In part, due to my own shortcomings. But... as part of a college career and education, I would expect some significant guidance. And, in addition to everything else, that was rather completely lacking, in my own experience.

To use the TL;DR meme: College is the new high school.

(Only, our society can't support four more years of high school. And so the system is now rapidly breaking down.)

In a World Shaped by College Dropouts, Education is the Next Bubble

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