School is all about signaling, not skill-building

School is all about signaling, not skill-building(latimes.com)

315 points by kermittd 7 years ago | 216 comments

analog31 7 years ago |

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.

alexandercrohde 7 years ago | |

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?)

mcguire 7 years ago | | |

* I've rarely been asked about my GPA either, which is good because I sucked. On the other hand, A good GPA would have made some things I wanted to do easier.

* Most technical questions are basic because most "technical" jobs are very basic. However, there are people out there building operating systems kernels, secured software, and life-critical systems; I'm reasonably assured that you would have to demonstrate more than competence with a hash map.

* I too have never been asked to write a proof. But, thanks to my education, the techniques needed to write a proof are rather ingrained with how I understand writing code.

* I, too, ask people where they went to college, because if they went to the U. of Washington or Carnegie Mellon or someplace like that, I can't assume they'll know Kantian ethics but I can assume they'll have learned something; I can't make that assumption if they went to the U. of Phoenix, ITT Tech, or EPRI.

* Positions at the level of director do seem to be assigned by luck/politics/privilege. Positions at the level of internal medicine specialist, structural engineer, and the like tend not to be.

JMTQp8lwXL 7 years ago |

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.

hooch 7 years ago |

“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”?

Razengan 7 years ago |

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?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsXVk37bltHxD1rDPwtNM8Q

Ken_Adler 7 years ago |

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 — ....

Zombiethrowaway 7 years ago | |

...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?

identity-haver 7 years ago | |

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.

avcdsuia 7 years ago | |

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?

yorwba 7 years ago | | |

Also not a US citizen and I don't know how it works at Princeton, but in my experience, getting actionable feedback on assignments is rare. You may get told where your mistakes are, but not how you should have done it instead. Most of the value of assignments is in simply doing them; that forces you to review the necessary material.

As for office hours, I never went to any, but I assume that they're not going to check your student ID, just as they don't check before lectures.

Zarath 7 years ago |

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.

kevintb 7 years ago |

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.

dash2 7 years ago |

Article was fine until this:

  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.

tylerhou 7 years ago | |

The author is an econ professor at George Mason.

xondono 7 years ago | | |

The author has a book on the subject and is one of the main proponents of signalling in education :D

mcguire 7 years ago | |

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.

hopler 7 years ago | | |

Social expectations vary by social class. The low education religious people you describe are a different social class from educated business and technical professionals

IshKebab 7 years ago | |

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.

ergocoder 7 years ago |

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.

personjerry 7 years ago |

Just like in startups, you get what you measure. In school, you measure by grades, so you get students who play the rules to get good grades.

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 |

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.

daenz 7 years ago | |

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?

subjectsigma 7 years ago | | |

I agree with you 100%, the point was that degrees are not worthless, not that the system is inherently unfair.

BadassFractal 7 years ago |

> 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.

sanxiyn 7 years ago | |

Yes, but Harvard etc is super special snowflake exception.

BadassFractal 7 years ago | | |

My point is that signaling works without any sort of coursework. The instant you make it into Stanford, you're a Stanford kid, which puts you into an elite group of desirable employees.

And of course these colleges are special snowflakes, they wouldn't be signals otherwise. Nobody cares if you went to a community college down the street, it associates no household name with you.

known 7 years ago |

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

glglwty 7 years ago |

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.

Godel_unicode 7 years ago | |

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.

barry-cotter 7 years ago | | |

Georgia Tech On Campus M.Sc. CS $40,000

Georgia Tech Online M.Sc. CS $8,000

adamnemecek 7 years ago | |

Also the main students have very little say in this.

lifeisstillgood 7 years ago |

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.

osdiab 7 years ago | |

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.

mcguire 7 years ago | | |

Ohio State is a fairly well respected CS program. (And I'm not just saying that because one of my advisor's more successful students is on the faculty.)

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-science-sch...

US News puts them at #30, but that's really the 13th group---there's a lot of ties.

I think I disagree with that list though---there's many schools higher in the list that I've never read a paper from. They can't be good.

(UT Austin has dropped to 10th!! I think I want my money back.)

solidasparagus 7 years ago | |

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.

barry-cotter 7 years ago | |

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.

Spooky23 7 years ago |

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.

YeGoblynQueenne 7 years ago |

>> 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.

davidivadavid 7 years ago | |

Trying to engage people's opinion is generally an advert for someone's ideas.

mcguire 7 years ago |

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.

(End of part 3; see part 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409381)

mcguire 7 years ago |

(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.

(End part 1: mockery.)

triangleman 7 years ago | |

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.

gist 7 years ago |

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,

Mirioron 7 years ago | |

He got his PhD from Princeton though. That's probably why he mentions Princeton as his example.

gist 7 years ago | | |

It's super ironic that he would use the sleigh of hand in his writing in that way. Sure at the end it's disclosed that he is not (currently) teaching at Princeton.

therealdrag0 7 years ago |

Author is in one of my favorite EconTalk podcast episodes: "Bryan Caplan on the Case Against Education"

Probably similar content covered, but it's a good discussion. And he covers some of the points I see people trying to argue in the comments here.

[0] http://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-edu...

bel_marinaio 7 years ago |

Does anyone else feel like college is mostly about class gate-keeping? I am not saying education isn't important.

In these digital times is paying $100k+ really necessary to get the skills you need for a good career? or is it more about separating the haves from the have nots using a very expensive piece of paper?

lvs 7 years ago |

All these anti-education articles are pretty tedious. If you believe it's the schools who have it all wrong by teaching subjects that aren't useful for building phone apps, you're probably already pretty set in your worldview.

nosianu 7 years ago | |

The article clearly is pro education. It shows that the system is less so. Example quote:

> Almost everyone pays lip service to the glories of education, but actions speak louder than words. 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 — is a strong sign that students understand the value of certification over actual learning.

> You can see the same priorities when students pick their classes. Students notoriously seek out “easy A’s” — professors who give high grades in exchange for little work.

Also, some comments here somehow manage to read into the article that it claims that you don't learn anything. Even just the quote above shows the opposite when the author describes the difference between going to Princeton lectures for free or for a piece of paper. From the second quoted paragraph, which is as testable statement, it seems that in practice education is not the main priority - and I don't see how one could interpret the article in a way that he supports that. It clearly is a criticism of those sad facts.

The author clearly shows what he would like even in just this single sentence alone:

> indeed, the rare, earnestly curious student touches our hearts

vezycash 7 years ago | |

You mean anti-schooling. Education is much more than schooling.

Formal education is classroom-based, provided by trained teachers. Informal education happens outside the classroom, in after-school programs, community-based organizations, museums, libraries, or at home. http://enhancinged.wgbh.org/started/what/formal.html

In other words, if I'm reading at home, undergoing on the job training, even picking people's pockets, I'm getting educated.

bwang29 7 years ago |

Has anyone seen a framework for companies to screen emotional skills such as resilience, drive and internal motivations for candidates and have done it well?

zwkrt 7 years ago | |

The voight kompff test is still in beta. People change over time and have complex motives which change in different environments. For instance, I know I work harder when my coworkers are more personally friendly, but generally despise work-related social events.

mikaraento 7 years ago | |

McKinsey tests for something like this through a structured probing of past actions. I always felt we did a reasonably good job of discovering evidence of such skills.

nezzor 7 years ago |

Or both you know, that’s also an option.

known 7 years ago |

Education = Teaching + Coaching

Ericson2314 7 years ago |

It's an arms race tainting a lot more than education. Hopefully we can UBI + healthcare a détente.

dredmorbius 7 years ago |

There's a long history behind education, types of it, and the reasons, rationales, and interests behind these. One of the better synopses of these I've found is Wes Cecil's "Myths of the Modern American Mind: Education" (61 minutes, audio only):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFiiOm6fB3c

He traces the history back to Babylonia and scribal training, Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, medieval education, scholaticism and the rise of the Seven Liberal Arts with their Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and Quadrivium (Maths, Geometry, Music (or harmony) and Astronomy), the emergence of the modern physical and social sciences, and the Prussian Educational System which is the foundation of contemporary Western education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

Throughout virtually all of this there's been a sharp division between intellectual and technical education. The liberal arts were distinguished from the technical arts, also called Artes Mechanicae (mechanical arts), servile arts, or vulgar arts, originally: tailoring and weaving, agriculture, architecture and masonry, warfare and hunting, trade, cooking, and blacksmithing and metalurgy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_Mechanicae

Since 1800 or so, the distinctions have largely been between pure skills, including trade, vocational, and technical skills (including STEM), professional training (law, medicine, military, religion, and general administration), and humanities or liberal arts. The relative prestige of these has shifted fairly markedly over this period, as well as the increased specialisation within academic curricula and programmes, with the University of Virginia offering eight fields of study in 1825, and Johns Hopkins University using the term "major" for the first time in 1877. The emergence of technical schools, such as M.I.T. (1861) with specialised courses of study helped drive this transformation.

Cecil's treatment is on the light side, but engaging.

John Stuart Mill's observations on the indoctrinational role of education are also interesting. As others have said, schools play multiple roles.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00346760110081599

mcguire 7 years ago |

I don't really want to dig into the details of the arguments for the value of a "generalized, liberal arts education" here, mostly because I need to do some research on those arguments before evaluating them.

But, on the other hand, I really do believe that an education in ye olde trivium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium), quadrivium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium), and a number of other areas are important for the citizens of a modern, democratic republic, quite aside from how "Literacy and numeracy are vital, but few of us use history, poetry, higher mathematics or foreign languages after graduation."

I see this education as important on at least two levels. First, to fight the natural human tendency to assume that everyone else is like us (and that anyone who is different is deviant): we're all programmers here, right? And anyone who doesn't think in discrete, logical steps, is the bizarre alien them, right?

More seriously, I had to take Texas government and history classes in college, the requirement for which (a history professor informed us with glee) came out of a number of soldiers from Texas who were captured during the Korean War and who decided to stay in China after the war. (Honestly, I have no idea how those things fit together.) But those classes and others like them, while not directly benefiting me as a computer programmer, did provide some background and common ground between me and a huge number of other people who would otherwise have nothing in common with me.

Secondly, to fight the natural tendency for someone who is well skilled in a certain field to assume that field is all that exists. (You should recognize this from this very forum, where people suggest technological fixes for problems which are not technological in nature. And yes, there are problems which are not technological nature.)

As for the wisdom of the students, choosing easy classes and complaining about those on topics they'll never use in real life? I took Spanish as a foreign language which I never really learned and promptly forgot, took four semesters to get through two semesters of calculus (badly; all my math be discrete), and those damn semesters of government and history. Guess what? None of those things were useful to me in my subsequent career. Nope, not even calculus, that horrid waste of time and grade points.

On the other hand, I regard my lack of knowledge as a bad thing. A usable foreign language would have been nice. Other programmers do use calculus; I just had to avoid those jobs.

So, yeah, I pretty much disagree with everything in this article.

(End of part 2. See part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19409228)

cromwellian 7 years ago |

"You study arcane subjects year after year, knowing you’ll never use most of what you learned after graduation"

Well, that wasn't true for me, and I'm pretty sure for those in engineering or science, it isn't, but even the history, philosophy, and economics courses I took I recall and use. Even Steve Jobs, who merely audited a class on calligraphy, took a great value from it.

The fundamental flaw of Capland argument, who seems to be pushing this theme for years, is to view education purely in terms of economic benefit. It could simultaneously be true that the vast majority of your salary comes from signalling, but it could also be true that you gained great value from your education. Not everyone who gets an advanced education tries to maximize salary.

Capland's analysis, for example, would completely ignore the value of someone who chose to become a teacher or open source contributor.

Also, by induction, you could apply his argument to high school. Do we have evidence during the industrial revolution where blue collar factory work started to require more than an 8th grade education, that it made any difference besides signalling on salary?

Or, if you look at developing economies, where people often experience significant increases in wages as they move up the industrial ladder, sometimes without even full literacy, but merely from on the job experience. Should we assume education isn't worthwhile if you can't show a correlation between education and wages other than signalling?

One of the frustrating things about these kinds of economic analyses is that they narrowing look at only a sliver of what it is to be a human being, or the potential positive market externalities by having educated population. If we just measure the overall social improvements from the education of women, not in terms of individual wage performance, but in terms of overall health of society itself, it can't be reduced to a micro-analysis.

As a side note, I've seen Bryan's work forwarded within libertarian and right wing forums, in large part, to justify arguments to defund and dismantle support for college, both from a cultural aspect (Colleges seen as liberal/left institutions) but also from a notion that they don't want the government funding it. The fact that he's funded by the Cato Institute raises my suspicion that there's a political angle involved.

Even if you could argue college is not producing economic gains, but merely a signal, one has to look at a future where structural unemployment from automation may make a lot of work unneccessary, period. Do we eliminate education when work is no longer a necessity? Or could it be, that it might be better if people have a lifelong opportunity for intellectual enlightenment, it might be cheaper than funding prisons to house them, or falling back to religious institutions to give humans something to do that has meaning besides straight up consumption.

npunt 7 years ago |

I get where the author is coming from, and agree that higher ed isn't particularly efficient and has some serious problems. And yes, it is a 'game' to an extent. I've worked with 100+ colleges & universities and found their approach to educating large numbers of students to be sorely in need of revision. However, I also found this article simplistic and very much the product of an economist with a particular agenda rather than someone with more of a background in learning whose take on it is reasoned and informed.

First, and this is important, he seems to value only knowledge/information currently known. Part of learning is forgetting, and knowing that you've forgotten something. His argument doesn't take this into account at all, and essentially places equal value in someone who never knew something vs someone who once learned something but forgot it. These are not equivalent at all, but its a very economist way of reducing the world and accidentally losing fidelity in the process.

A great deal of higher ed is about exposure to the breadth of ideas that make up our current understanding of the world. You get a chance to explore fields of study and use frameworks, processes, etc from them. All these shape your perception and approach to life, help you discover what motivates you, and provide on-ramps for re-learning later on. Contrast this with someone who's never been exposed to things, and they simply wouldn't know what they didn't know. In the age of Google and being able to find a solution to anything, you still need to know what question to ask, and that requires an exposure to different fields and approaches and to know what you once knew or were exposed to, but have since forgotten. It builds intellectual humility, versus the self-assuredness of ignorance.

Next, the turn of phrase in the intro that students "have to soak up precious knowledge like a sponge" is basically the theory that the mind is an empty vessel to be filled, which is a common misunderstanding of how humans learn. We learn through interaction with our environment, and the things we learn are as much perspective, approach & process, etc as it is about fact-based knowledge. Not sure if author is using this term interchangeably with learning, but based on other reading it seems like he may not have strongest grasp of this distinction.

These learning science nuances are just one thing the author has a blind spot for. I also don't see him mentioning anything about the role of education beyond simply a job market feeder. This isn't and hasn't ever been the sole metric higher education has ever held itself to - only trade schools focus on this metric. It's incredibly reductive to view education in this way, not least of which because you lose a necessary precondition for successful democracy (an informed citizenry).

Here's another telling quote, clearly showing his argument has a pretty narrow focus:

According to Amazon reviews of this guy's book, he likes to set up a lot of straw men, and this is an example of one. Of course employers are not necessarily paying for acquired skills, but they're also not just paying for signaling (his focus) - they could be paying for acquired experience, perspective, demonstration of sticking things through, self-knowledge, etc.

Again I think it's important to look at the words he's using to get a sense for whether he understands the nuances of what he's talking about. "Skill" is a particular thing that most of higher ed intentionally doesn't focus on because they're not trade schools. Either he doesn't quite get that, or he's choosing to reinterpret education's purpose for the sake of his straw man. If we reduce everything to a market-oriented "skill", knowledge, theory, perspective, etc have no value. A good economist doesn't leave value on the table like that, unless they're trying to fit it into their particular argument.

His anecdote about a guerrilla student auditing a degree's worth of classes and not having them valued isn't a particularly smart take even from an economics perspective. That's a one-off libertarian fantasy argument of sticking it to the system. At scale this idea collapses, because a) schools would crack down on free-riders, and b) once this good is more available in the market, the market would respond by pricing it better. But with an n=1, the market can't price it, because they don't know what it means. Did this student actually show up to these classes, or just say they did? Did they get to know their classmates and learn from them? Did they understand anything they were being taught? As an entrepreneur who's had to hire quite a bit, I'd see a prospective employee's claim of having attended Princeton for four years but not getting a degree as needing serious verification.

I think an economist's perspective is important to add to the discussion on how to make higher ed better, and signaling is an area that higher ed needs to get better at (see microcredentialing as one solution for instance). However, while the author makes some good points about grade / degree inflation and alludes to a few other things that really matter like rising costs, I also don't think he's got the macro perspective really well sorted, at least from the blind spots above - either he's willfully ignoring them for sake of argument, or genuinely doesn't know them because he wasn't exposed enough to those fields. Teaching a couple years at Princeton doesn't make one an expert on the system as a whole, much as just getting an education doesn't mean you know the first thing about how education works. Elite colleges work very differently from other forms of post-secondary education, and lessons learned & opinions formed there are not necessarily broadly applicable. Elite colleges are so much more about signaling that its easy to over-index on that and form a theory that sounds nice but isn't very accurate.

Any call for blowing up a system needs to be put in a larger context that any large organization / institution is going to be inherently pretty inefficient, but this doesn't mean the absence of it is a good alternative. Thing is he has a particular POV on this, if you read more of his bio [1]. He works in a very libertarian-focused economics dept at GWU and is funded by folks that are taking a particular agenda toward education and have taken a (highly unusual) active role in faculty selection [2]. This background alone shouldn't be disqualifying (lots of agendas exist in ed, good to have diversity of perspectives), but can be a lens through with you read this and whether he's being intellectually honest in all his arguments.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Caplan

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/us/koch-donors-george-mas...

NoblePublius 7 years ago |

Admissions based on standardized test scores ONLY. Make colleges co-sign loans. Fixed it.

ni3hao3 7 years ago |

The upper class view education as necessary for signaling, the middle class view it as necessary to build skills, and the lower class view it as useless.

adamnemecek 7 years ago |

The main problem is that students in the US are insanely busy. The curriculum is substandard no matter where you go. In the future, I’m hoping to see more individual studying encouraged by the school. It’s a good skill to pick up, esp considering skills might age faster.

Classes are a waste of time, out of the 1.5 hrs, there’s maybe 20 minutes of content.

Teachers tend to be full of themselves and incompetent.

Professors are busy with research, grants etc. curricula tends to be out of date.

God when I think about the shit I could have done in the 16 years that I spent in school I legit want to puke.

But the worst people are the administrators. I’m yet to see a single school administrator make a rational decision. This is particularly apparent in the responses to school shootings. Yeah, make it more like prisons, thats are gonna help. Also the prevalence of women in school administration is not good for the male school population, they make decisions that tend to ignore certain gender differences.

Don’t even get me started on the idiocy that is school athletics.

kodz4 7 years ago | |

Don't get into the habit of looking for things to blame. The internet will keep you well fed. Finding things to blame, obscures clear thought and expression of your underlying needs. Find those needs and keep focus on them without blaming anyone. It's a much healthier route to connecting with people and getting those needs met.

sanxiyn 7 years ago | |

In my experience, teachers are competent. It's just that their main competence is teaching those who are unmotivated and unwilling to learn, so those who are willing mostly get neglected. It makes perfect sense if you think about it.

Godel_unicode 7 years ago | |

Do you see the contradiction in saying that school was easy and pointless, and simultaneously saying it kept you from doing things? It sorta has to be one or the other.

The blatant sexism is also a problem.

adamnemecek 7 years ago | | |

What sexism?

No, you are required to pay attention, and therefore unable to do something more productive.

throwaway_9168 7 years ago | |

Why didn't you drop out then?

adamnemecek 7 years ago | | |

Visa.