In my view, school does not admit to a singular purpose, even if a number of people seem to achieve similar results from it. Instead, different students can pursue different strategies through school, and get different things out of it. Even if signaling is a benefit of school, it doesn't need to be the only benefit.
School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually are.
Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack. Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a pitfall of school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.
In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids, along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.
The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack school to your advantage?"
Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or make even worse hacks emerge.
Well part of why I upvoted this is because it would have been useful information to me 15 years ago.
Certainly school can be used for any purpose (perhaps that's a truism). But the author's point also includes the fact that the market (and society) is largely indifferent to what you learn at school.
In order to "Hack" school we need to be real with ourselves about what the world after school looks like.
- I've never been asked GPA once (one data point)
- Most technical questions I get asked are basic and solvable with a hash map
- I've never been asked to write a proof as part of an interview
- My degrees (business/psychology) have never been useful in my career.
- Many many people have asked my wear I went to college, and I can tell they care about the name of the school first and foremost.
- Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)
Maybe for the elite. But for middle class people like myself, I developed marketable skills, secured multiple internships, and found it easy to get a full-time job straight out of school. I had about a years worth of industry experience via internships (one for 6 months, two others 3 months each).
Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic programming skills very quick.
Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters more in these fields? Again, signaling is no measure of real skill.
Obviously, like most people I'm upset about the pay-to-play scheme but in reality very, very few people choose that option. 99.9%+ of applications are not pay-to-play, so we should still hold a good deal of faith in our higher education system. It is imperfect and has many issues, but this article title is broadly incorrect about the purpose of higher education today.
edit:
> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to impart useful training?
My first company that hired me out of college got a much better deal waiting for me to complete my senior year. Yes, each year isn't worth the same. This makes sense. Senior year was my capstone -- building valuable communication skills in a team environment. Year 1? I was finishing the basics of CS 101. Of course the last year is worth more than the first.
Would you pay 50% the price for a half-finished version of Microsoft Word? Probably not. It'd be far less useful of a piece of software.
“If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning“
Isn’t this how Steve Jobs treated college? And “Apple” was his “diploma”?
As an employer I would not care much if a new hire only had the skills of uni but not the diploma. But I’m lazy and there is no way I’m going to do what’s essentially 5 years worth of examination to ensure the candidate lives up to some self professed level of education. Especially not in a 100+ pile of applications from others who where vetted as they went by the university. It’s not “certification” over actual learning. It’s the fact that the companies need easy certainty of that actual learning or you’re going to the bottom of the pile of applications. If you don’t have a certificate but have other proof of skill that’s just as good. Dropped out of uni to build a company that managed to launch a product but later went under? Great, who cares about the diploma, you have proof of you ability.
Yes, but he might stick around and take and pass the Ph.D. qualifying exams and then be well on his way to a Princeton degree: At least at one time, the Princeton math department Web site stated that, IIRC, "students are expected to prepare for the qualifying exams on their own and that no courses are offered to prepare students for the qualifying exams. Courses are introductions to research by experts in their fields."
So, look at the qualifying exams, see what might study, and while attending classes attend the ones that can help with the exams.
In addition, might have available some profs to answer questions.
In addition, likely one way to impress Princeton or any university is to publish, and one way to start to do that is to attend research seminars and see what some of the open questions are, also notice what some of the profs and grad students are working on. So, this way get some guidance on what might attack as a research problem.
I got a good pure/applied math Ph.D. Well over 50% of what I needed and used for courses, the qualifying exams, and my research was what I'd studied independently after my 4 year college degree and start of grad school.
Then a grad course in optimization gave a good introduction to the Kuhn-Tucker condition, maybe say Karush-Kuhn-Tucker. After the course I saw a tricky question about the constraint qualifications, didn't see an answer in the library, so signed up for a 'reading course' to 'investigate' the question. Two weeks later I had a nice, clean solution, wrote it up, and was done with the course -- two weeks. Later I published. There I'd noticed that my work also answered a question stated but not solved in the famous Arrow, Hurwicz, Uzawa paper applying the KKTC to economics. I published in JOTA.
So, a 'walk in' student at Princeton might have been able to have done much the same. With such research and passing the qualifying exams they would be on the way to a Princeton Ph.D.
As an aside, back in the good ol' days, students paid their instructors directly, out of pocket. You can damn well bet more than "near-zero" effort would be applied in that case.
Anyway, society spends a lot of effort supporting students, from scholarships and tax exemptions to the social beliefs that allow the random person to spend several years doing nothing apparently productive without censure. But all that only applies to students actually enrolled---non-guerrilla students. Guerrilla studenting, as it was in the past, would only be the province of the idly wealthy. That, I think, is why no one tries that route.
One key thing this paragraph misses is the characterization of this sort of person. Imagine we have a person that would independently, without extrinsic reward or 'push', show up to classes completely of their own accord. And we must further assume that they would engage in all assignments and somehow try to regularly test their understanding - the feedback exams offer is crucial to demonstrating understanding. And we assume they're doing well on Princeton quality and standard of work, all completely independently.
How did this person do in high school? Given high school is orders of magnitude more trivial, we can assume they were likely at or near the top of their classes, and probably would have shown remarkable results in skill assessment exams. And with that sort of motivation he also probably would have been involved in immense extracurricular and other such events. This person would likely have been able to get into any university he ever wanted.
Top universities do provide a certainly better than average education, but their main strength has nothing to do with their quality of education. It's the quality of their student body - which turns success stories into a self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you start an 'basketball school' and only accept people that are at least 6'6", highly athletic, can dunk from x feet, run 100 meters in y seconds, etc. Go figure -- you're going to 'produce' a disproportionately huge number of NBA quality players simply because your admittance is already heavily biased to individuals who are already headed in that direction.
The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton which would be comparable to the sort of person that could get admitted to 'Basketball U'. Regardless of what happens during those 4 years, you're already almost certainly going to be ahead of 99% of the rest of the population. The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'. E.g. even if our basketball university had a pretty bad education system, you'd still see NBA quality players emerging from it at a way way higher rate than the population of non-admitted individuals.
It would be cool if early school was like a video game tutorial, to help children see their place in the world at large, as well as humanity's place in the cosmos:
Welcome to Earth.
You are a human, and this is [country/city], in the year 2XXX.
We share this planet with many species, but we are the only ones we know that can talk and invent and build.
The light in the sky is a star, and there are other planets around it, but this is the only one we know that has life.
There are many other stars out there that you can see at night, and all of them have planets of their own, and maybe someday you will visit them.
You are in school so you can learn how to do what you want.
...and so on, while showing a montage of places, creatures and inventions. :)
History classes should focus on the inconveniences and uglinesses our species has plodded through ("We did not always have cars or phones or toilets.."), not just a droning journal of events.
Maybe some of you would be interested in creating a YouTube series like this? Perhaps like a Kurzgesagt [0] For Kids?
Crazy story: my son actually did what the author suggested, he talked his way into a free education at Princeton!!!
He audited all the classes he wanted to... no diploma, but what a great experience (and a great story....)
From the article:
Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — ....
...and? From a job market standpoint, does it help him? Does he "sell" it on his resume, in interviews? Is it valued? Did it help him competence/knowledge-wise?
From a personal standpoint, did it help/enrich him?
You definitely can't audit chemistry & engineering labs, architecture studio, geology field camp, etc. It seems that the more you can get the education by auditing, the more "signaling" the education is.
Not a US citizen, but AFAIK, a course includes lectures, office hours, assignments etc. How did he manage to fully understand the materials without all the resources that are provided only for registered students?
Come on, have we really swung so far on the "game is rigged" and "college isn't what it used to be" pendulum that we're acting like college doesn't build useful skills. Before college I had never written a program in my life outside of my TI-83. Coming out of college I was able to secure a full time job at a highly respected software company. They didn't hire me because my program was great (it wasn't that great), but they hired me because I can code well, or at least I like to think so.
We’re in the minority. Most professions aren’t engineering. Or medicine.
Think of the average student graduating with a generic business degree. What actual skills does this person possess after 4 years of schooling?
This is why so many Fortune 500 companies have new grad trainee programs that they funnel people through. The fact is, most of these generic “business” jobs can be done by anyone with a few months of on the job learning.
How many project managers, marketing managers, account executives, sales people, HR professionals, tech support, etc. could’ve stepped into those same roles without spending 4 years at an extremely expensive party (as they would have 50 years ago)?
This article is just a companion piece for the author's book, The Case Against Education [1]. I'm reading this book for philosophy class and one of my top questions going in was "what about the engineers?" Well, Caplan heads that off at the pass: his father was an engineer and he says repeatedly that vocational degrees like engineering and medicine are about more than signalling. His earnings data prove that point, too, because it shows that the arts degrees people people poke fun at the most, earn the least.
I had a philosophy degree and taught myself to code as a teenager. I was able to secure a full time job with a highly respected software company upon graduation, and they didn’t give a fuck what degree I had as long as I had one and could code.
I learned a lot in college, but I definitely didn’t learn any direct job skills. I just went to a big state school with a respected CS program (that I was not enrolled in) which drew a lot of companies to our career fair. I think that kind of shows the multiple layers of signaling involved here...
The only outcome the article focuses on is employment. Collectively, we used to know that a well-educated populous led to a better society. This applies doubly so for a representative democracy, where making informed choices leads directly to better policy.
Training of the mind also allows the educated to penetrate deceptions, deliberately muddled claims, and contradictions. But that result seems so uncommon these days.
I strongly disagree. Elite colleges are all about signaling. But I don't doubt for a second that my CS degree taught me an enormous amount - some skill-building, lots of abstract thinking - that I wouldn't have been able to achieve as quickly as anywhere else.
These behaviors make perfect sense if — and only if —
employers are eager to detect workers who dutifully
confirm to social expectations. In a society where
parents, teachers and peers glorify graduation, failing
classes and dropping out are deviant acts.
This is a misunderstanding. Employers pay attention to qualifications, e.g. on a CV, as an informational shortcut. If you don't get the qualification, then you are pooling with everyone else who didn't - including nonconformists, but also the incompetent and lazy. If you get the qualification, even only just, then you are in the category with everyone else who did, including brilliant top achievers.
Maybe employers do care about social conformity, maybe even overwhelmingly so - but this evidence doesn't show that. Looks like a journalist misreading the academic literature.
Weirdly, when I was leaving for college, I was warned that spending any time at a big school like UT Austin would end up making me a deviant. There was talk about someone's cousin who came back from Austin wearing leather and with a nose ring. Lesbianism was a possibility.
Certainly, nobody thought college was for those who conform to social expectations.
Not at all sure if I came out deviant or just crazy.
I agree. Employers don't care about people "dutifully conforming to social expectations". They are that a) people can do the job, and b) they aren't super weird and annoying to work with.
In an ideal world, school is great. But, in a real world, it monopolizes knowledge and makes a huge propaganda that it is the only way to learn. We have been doing this propaganda for decades.
Then, parents, who don't know any better, think that they need to send their kids to colleges at all cost. They don't even care much about which college or which subject it is. Then, some business capitalizes on that by making a low-quality college. Then, we have this strange issue with student's debt where the student is not really hireable.
I talked to my colleagues at Google anonymously through Blind. And a few, even at Google, said (and many agreed) that either they took the student loan or they became a drug dealer (or something equally bad). I was quite surprised that even googlers would hold this kind of views.
I agree though that being $xx,xxx in debt is better than being a drug dealer. But, in my opinion, those cannot possibly be the only two choices. I didn't grow up in US, so maybe I don't understand the situation here.
Because this is Hacker News, let's stick with technology: have none of you guys ever experienced the power gap? Seriously?
I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading shitty PowerPoints about how one might do that. The lower tier group? I was still helping them with their homework, which was basically sorting algorithms. One of them barely understood classes, and one of them was still struggling with properly constructing for loops after years of education. All of us paid absurd amounts of money to be where we were.
The Ivy guys were also well-off and came from good homes; that just means that money begets power begets money, not that their degrees were worthless paper. It makes sense that a professor of economics would write tripe like this, maybe it applies in his field but not here.
I've had this conversation with a coworker who was frustrated that people with wealth could leverage that wealth to create more opportunities for themselves. My response is essentially: "isn't that what you want to do for yourself?" He seems to think it is more fair if someone with less wealth got access to those opportunities, instead of the people with wealth. How is that more fair? Why does it matter who gets the opportunities, as long as they're going to people with a low risk of wasting them?
> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from graduation, from crossing the academic finish line.
Not even. Just being able to show that you "went" to Harvard is a powerful enough of a signal. You can join, drop out immediately after, start a startup, fail, an then likely end up somewhere really prestigious anyway.
Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's study showed that, if teachers were led to expect enhanced performance from children, then the children's performance was enhanced.
Technologies like online education would crush the existing education system if the playground is fair. Unfortunately the latter has public funding in it and prevents the society from moving forward.
Except online education is dominated by the existing players, and they are charging the same kind of money you would pay in person. If you're getting a STEM degree especially, Coursera will charge you something like $600/credit.
This is because of, wait for it, signaling. You don't actually need all that much education to be an entry level software engineer, especially outside silicon valley. But you do need those letters after your name.
I think the article seriously underestimated the effort to make it through a thre year degree at an elite college - let's say an MIT mechanical engineering degree - my understanding it is 80 hour weeks, with yearly inflection points where the faculty will try and eliminate the bottom 10% or so. get a first or 2.1 there and you are not signalling attendance but genuine effort. (Any alumni able to comment? )
There are signals and signals and disparaging an entire school is ... unfair.
I went to Stanford for Computer Science, and from my friends who went to Ohio State, equivalent courses sound significantly harder there to me - not much grade inflation, larger amounts of work. It’s anecdotal but I think the primary difference is the power of the network you interact with - which feeds a virtuous cycle of ambition and drive, given how empowering having that network is. Not the difficulty or rigor of coursework, except in marginal ways (for instance, d.school was nascent in popularity when I was at Stanford, so I suppose I got a sneak peek into design thinking before it got more popular elsewhere) but that’s not a dependable advantage of elite schools IMO and I probably would have run into the concepts in industry either way.
At MIT you can get a degree relatively easily if you make that your goal, but most people don't. I have respect for MIT grads because more often than not that means you have intelligence and work ethic. I've seen very smart people fail to graduate because their work ethic wasn't good enough (I don't think I ever met anyone there that wasn't smart) so having a diploma definitely means more than just attending.
The only élite university in the US with a significant drop out rate is Cal Tech. I’m sure there are lots of people who went to MIT who graduate with a softer degree than they expected to get going in but drop out rates at the tip top are low. At top graduate schools they birder on non-existent. Most years no one drops out of Yale Law School.
School has been undermined in some cases to be a signaling thing because it’s the last legal way to discriminate at scale, especially in lower rigor subjects.
>> Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money.”
Here I was thinking this was an article that genuinely sought to engage my opinion, when in truth it was only an advert for someone's book.
I think I'll make it a habit from now on to scroll all the way to the bottom of opinion articles to save myself some time.
There are some things very wrong with the American education system, but I suspect a focus on "signalling" and a desire for job training over general education is going to miss all of the important ones.
In the first place, the concern only with reading, writing, and 'rithmatic along with standardized testing are probably destroying most of the value of the public education system. Thanks, everyone. Good job.
Secondly, the belief that any bachelor's degree is as good as any other, along with the corresponding rise of for-profit educational institutions (along with not-for-profit ones which behave like for-profit institutions) leads directly to this whole signalling flap.
A degree from Joe's Diploma Mill is a bad signalling indicator because the education Joe provides is crap. A degree from Stanford is a good signal because Stanford provides a good education. Don't go to Joe's; it's a waste of money and time.
Back at UT, many students and the occasional visiting job recruiter complained that the classes didn't cover "job-relevant" skills. (x86 assembler, anyone?) On the other hand, those same recruiters kept coming back, and showering money on recent grads; something they notably didn't do at, say, ITT Tech or DeVry, in spite of the fact that those schools taught nothing but "job-related skills."
Sure, a degree from Stanford is a signal that you are smart and hard-working. That's because Stanford is hard to get a degree from unless you are smart and hard-working. Some of that is simply jumping-through-hoops-ism, but most of it is because Stanford requires you to learn hard shit. And that's why smart and hard-working students go there.
(I'm going to break up my initial response to this article into several pieces, because if I don't, everyone will read the first sentence, down vote it, and ignore the rest. Plus, it gives everyone an opportunity to downvote me several times. :-))
Is it ironic that this was written by Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., a professor[1] of Economics[2] at George Mason University?
[1] I'm getting a certain amusement from the image of Prof. Caplan, at a meeting of the current Economics faculty discussing prospective faculty candidates, voting against all the U. of Chicago grads in favor of Earl, who has a GED and audited a few economics classes.
[2] Economics? Really? The most signally of the signaling degrees. The field which, aside from its ability to demonstrate rightthink, is worthless outside academia and politics, not least because of its long history of disconnection with reality.
My understanding is that of all schools of economics, the Chicago school is the least disconnected from reality, in that it rightly recognizes its own "dismal" science as a social science first.
The article gives the impression that he is a professor at Princeton but he is not. He is a professor at George Mason University.
The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that:
> If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton,
[+] [-] analog31|7 years ago|reply
School is a complex system. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Adapt the pieces to make it do something useful for you. In short, hack school. It shocks me that a site devoted to "Hacker" news hasn't guessed that school is begging to be hacked, and makes me wonder how many true hackers there actually are.
Of course one possible hack is to follow a path of least resistance and emerge after 4 years with nothing but "signaling." But it's not the only hack. Signaling in the absence of real education could be viewed as a pitfall of school, not its purpose. A dark pattern, if you will.
In another age, this message would have been expressed by elders to their children in some sort of patronizing way, such as: "What you get out of college depends on what you put into it." I've certainly told this to my kids, along with the somewhat more detailed explanation about hacking.
The coding interview is a clue. At its core is a question: "How did you hack school to your advantage?"
Can school be hack-proofed? Experience with complex systems suggests this might not be a good idea, as it can kill the good hacks along with the bad, or make even worse hacks emerge.
[+] [-] alexandercrohde|7 years ago|reply
Certainly school can be used for any purpose (perhaps that's a truism). But the author's point also includes the fact that the market (and society) is largely indifferent to what you learn at school.
In order to "Hack" school we need to be real with ourselves about what the world after school looks like.
- I've never been asked GPA once (one data point)
- Most technical questions I get asked are basic and solvable with a hash map
- I've never been asked to write a proof as part of an interview
- My degrees (business/psychology) have never been useful in my career.
- Many many people have asked my wear I went to college, and I can tell they care about the name of the school first and foremost.
- Regardless of intellect, positions at the level director and above seem to be assigned very unpredictably (luck/politics/privilege?)
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|7 years ago|reply
Signaling doesn't buy you much. At least in engineering, because a technical interview will sort out whether or not you actually demonstrate basic programming skills very quick.
Software Engineering is a notable exception, most other fields don't quiz as part of the job interview process: soft skills and credentials or state licenses or bar exams are relied upon more heavily. Maybe signaling matters more in these fields? Again, signaling is no measure of real skill.
Obviously, like most people I'm upset about the pay-to-play scheme but in reality very, very few people choose that option. 99.9%+ of applications are not pay-to-play, so we should still hold a good deal of faith in our higher education system. It is imperfect and has many issues, but this article title is broadly incorrect about the purpose of higher education today.
edit:
> Researchers consistently find that most of education’s payoff comes from graduation, from crossing the academic finish line. The last year of high school is worth more than the first three; the last year of college is worth more than double the first three. This is hard to explain if employers are paying for acquired skills; do schools really wait until senior year to impart useful training?
My first company that hired me out of college got a much better deal waiting for me to complete my senior year. Yes, each year isn't worth the same. This makes sense. Senior year was my capstone -- building valuable communication skills in a team environment. Year 1? I was finishing the basics of CS 101. Of course the last year is worth more than the first.
Would you pay 50% the price for a half-finished version of Microsoft Word? Probably not. It'd be far less useful of a piece of software.
[+] [-] hooch|7 years ago|reply
Isn’t this how Steve Jobs treated college? And “Apple” was his “diploma”?
[+] [-] hjk05|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|7 years ago|reply
So, look at the qualifying exams, see what might study, and while attending classes attend the ones that can help with the exams.
In addition, might have available some profs to answer questions.
In addition, likely one way to impress Princeton or any university is to publish, and one way to start to do that is to attend research seminars and see what some of the open questions are, also notice what some of the profs and grad students are working on. So, this way get some guidance on what might attack as a research problem.
I got a good pure/applied math Ph.D. Well over 50% of what I needed and used for courses, the qualifying exams, and my research was what I'd studied independently after my 4 year college degree and start of grad school.
Then a grad course in optimization gave a good introduction to the Kuhn-Tucker condition, maybe say Karush-Kuhn-Tucker. After the course I saw a tricky question about the constraint qualifications, didn't see an answer in the library, so signed up for a 'reading course' to 'investigate' the question. Two weeks later I had a nice, clean solution, wrote it up, and was done with the course -- two weeks. Later I published. There I'd noticed that my work also answered a question stated but not solved in the famous Arrow, Hurwicz, Uzawa paper applying the KKTC to economics. I published in JOTA.
So, a 'walk in' student at Princeton might have been able to have done much the same. With such research and passing the qualifying exams they would be on the way to a Princeton Ph.D.
[+] [-] watwut|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quickthrower2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
Anyway, society spends a lot of effort supporting students, from scholarships and tax exemptions to the social beliefs that allow the random person to spend several years doing nothing apparently productive without censure. But all that only applies to students actually enrolled---non-guerrilla students. Guerrilla studenting, as it was in the past, would only be the province of the idly wealthy. That, I think, is why no one tries that route.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|7 years ago|reply
At which point Princeton would enforce their membership rules but that's another atory
[+] [-] rjf72|7 years ago|reply
How did this person do in high school? Given high school is orders of magnitude more trivial, we can assume they were likely at or near the top of their classes, and probably would have shown remarkable results in skill assessment exams. And with that sort of motivation he also probably would have been involved in immense extracurricular and other such events. This person would likely have been able to get into any university he ever wanted.
Top universities do provide a certainly better than average education, but their main strength has nothing to do with their quality of education. It's the quality of their student body - which turns success stories into a self fulfilling prophecy. Imagine you start an 'basketball school' and only accept people that are at least 6'6", highly athletic, can dunk from x feet, run 100 meters in y seconds, etc. Go figure -- you're going to 'produce' a disproportionately huge number of NBA quality players simply because your admittance is already heavily biased to individuals who are already headed in that direction.
The point of this is that none of this has anything to do with signaling, but it also has very little to do with the quality of education received. The value of an e.g. Princeton degree is that you're the sort of person that could get accepted into Princeton which would be comparable to the sort of person that could get admitted to 'Basketball U'. Regardless of what happens during those 4 years, you're already almost certainly going to be ahead of 99% of the rest of the population. The degree just works as 'proof of filtering'. E.g. even if our basketball university had a pretty bad education system, you'd still see NBA quality players emerging from it at a way way higher rate than the population of non-admitted individuals.
[+] [-] negamax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Razengan|7 years ago|reply
Welcome to Earth.
You are a human, and this is [country/city], in the year 2XXX.
We share this planet with many species, but we are the only ones we know that can talk and invent and build.
The light in the sky is a star, and there are other planets around it, but this is the only one we know that has life.
There are many other stars out there that you can see at night, and all of them have planets of their own, and maybe someday you will visit them.
You are in school so you can learn how to do what you want.
...and so on, while showing a montage of places, creatures and inventions. :)
History classes should focus on the inconveniences and uglinesses our species has plodded through ("We did not always have cars or phones or toilets.."), not just a droning journal of events.
Maybe some of you would be interested in creating a YouTube series like this? Perhaps like a Kurzgesagt [0] For Kids?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q
[+] [-] Ken_Adler|7 years ago|reply
He audited all the classes he wanted to... no diploma, but what a great experience (and a great story....)
From the article:
Ponder this: If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton, though, the guerrilla student would lack one precious thing: a diploma. The fact that almost no one tries this route — saving hundreds of thousands of dollars along the way — ....
[+] [-] Zombiethrowaway|7 years ago|reply
From a personal standpoint, did it help/enrich him?
[+] [-] identity-haver|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avcdsuia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zarath|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pembrook|7 years ago|reply
Think of the average student graduating with a generic business degree. What actual skills does this person possess after 4 years of schooling?
This is why so many Fortune 500 companies have new grad trainee programs that they funnel people through. The fact is, most of these generic “business” jobs can be done by anyone with a few months of on the job learning.
How many project managers, marketing managers, account executives, sales people, HR professionals, tech support, etc. could’ve stepped into those same roles without spending 4 years at an extremely expensive party (as they would have 50 years ago)?
[+] [-] chongli|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36319077-the-case-agains...
[+] [-] exelius|7 years ago|reply
I learned a lot in college, but I definitely didn’t learn any direct job skills. I just went to a big state school with a respected CS program (that I was not enrolled in) which drew a lot of companies to our career fair. I think that kind of shows the multiple layers of signaling involved here...
[+] [-] slowmovintarget|7 years ago|reply
Training of the mind also allows the educated to penetrate deceptions, deliberately muddled claims, and contradictions. But that result seems so uncommon these days.
[+] [-] kevintb|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dash2|7 years ago|reply
Maybe employers do care about social conformity, maybe even overwhelmingly so - but this evidence doesn't show that. Looks like a journalist misreading the academic literature.
[+] [-] tylerhou|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
Certainly, nobody thought college was for those who conform to social expectations.
Not at all sure if I came out deviant or just crazy.
[+] [-] IshKebab|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergocoder|7 years ago|reply
Then, parents, who don't know any better, think that they need to send their kids to colleges at all cost. They don't even care much about which college or which subject it is. Then, some business capitalizes on that by making a low-quality college. Then, we have this strange issue with student's debt where the student is not really hireable.
I talked to my colleagues at Google anonymously through Blind. And a few, even at Google, said (and many agreed) that either they took the student loan or they became a drug dealer (or something equally bad). I was quite surprised that even googlers would hold this kind of views.
I agree though that being $xx,xxx in debt is better than being a drug dealer. But, in my opinion, those cannot possibly be the only two choices. I didn't grow up in US, so maybe I don't understand the situation here.
[+] [-] personjerry|7 years ago|reply
Also see Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
[+] [-] subjectsigma|7 years ago|reply
I went to a decent school, not great but pretty well known. I had friends who went to community colleges and transferred to a school like mine, and friends who went to Ivy League schools. Our senior year, the Ivy guys were writing their own toy operating systems and compilers, and I was reading shitty PowerPoints about how one might do that. The lower tier group? I was still helping them with their homework, which was basically sorting algorithms. One of them barely understood classes, and one of them was still struggling with properly constructing for loops after years of education. All of us paid absurd amounts of money to be where we were.
The Ivy guys were also well-off and came from good homes; that just means that money begets power begets money, not that their degrees were worthless paper. It makes sense that a professor of economics would write tripe like this, maybe it applies in his field but not here.
[+] [-] daenz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BadassFractal|7 years ago|reply
Not even. Just being able to show that you "went" to Harvard is a powerful enough of a signal. You can join, drop out immediately after, start a startup, fail, an then likely end up somewhere really prestigious anyway.
[+] [-] sanxiyn|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|7 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
[+] [-] glglwty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Godel_unicode|7 years ago|reply
This is because of, wait for it, signaling. You don't actually need all that much education to be an entry level software engineer, especially outside silicon valley. But you do need those letters after your name.
[+] [-] adamnemecek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|7 years ago|reply
There are signals and signals and disparaging an entire school is ... unfair.
[+] [-] osdiab|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solidasparagus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barry-cotter|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
Here I was thinking this was an article that genuinely sought to engage my opinion, when in truth it was only an advert for someone's book.
I think I'll make it a habit from now on to scroll all the way to the bottom of opinion articles to save myself some time.
[+] [-] davidivadavid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
In the first place, the concern only with reading, writing, and 'rithmatic along with standardized testing are probably destroying most of the value of the public education system. Thanks, everyone. Good job.
Secondly, the belief that any bachelor's degree is as good as any other, along with the corresponding rise of for-profit educational institutions (along with not-for-profit ones which behave like for-profit institutions) leads directly to this whole signalling flap.
A degree from Joe's Diploma Mill is a bad signalling indicator because the education Joe provides is crap. A degree from Stanford is a good signal because Stanford provides a good education. Don't go to Joe's; it's a waste of money and time.
Back at UT, many students and the occasional visiting job recruiter complained that the classes didn't cover "job-relevant" skills. (x86 assembler, anyone?) On the other hand, those same recruiters kept coming back, and showering money on recent grads; something they notably didn't do at, say, ITT Tech or DeVry, in spite of the fact that those schools taught nothing but "job-related skills."
Sure, a degree from Stanford is a signal that you are smart and hard-working. That's because Stanford is hard to get a degree from unless you are smart and hard-working. Some of that is simply jumping-through-hoops-ism, but most of it is because Stanford requires you to learn hard shit. And that's why smart and hard-working students go there.
(End of part 3; see part 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381)
[+] [-] mcguire|7 years ago|reply
Is it ironic that this was written by Bryan Caplan, Ph.D., a professor[1] of Economics[2] at George Mason University?
[1] I'm getting a certain amusement from the image of Prof. Caplan, at a meeting of the current Economics faculty discussing prospective faculty candidates, voting against all the U. of Chicago grads in favor of Earl, who has a GED and audited a few economics classes.
[2] Economics? Really? The most signally of the signaling degrees. The field which, aside from its ability to demonstrate rightthink, is worthless outside academia and politics, not least because of its long history of disconnection with reality.
(End part 1: mockery.)
[+] [-] triangleman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gist|7 years ago|reply
The picture caption is "Princeton" and this paragraph is what had me thinking that:
> If a student wants to study at Princeton, he doesn’t really need to apply or pay tuition. He can simply show up and start taking classes. As a professor, I assure you that we make near-zero effort to stop unofficial education; indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts. At the end of four years at Princeton,
[+] [-] Mirioron|7 years ago|reply