By the time I had graduated, I had work experience in embedded systems, a criminal justice stats analysis lab, the Red Sox, and a counter terrorism research center in DC. And that's all well and good, but the most important thing I took from it was that it taught me very quickly which sectors I did not want to work in.

You often come out of high school with this idealized version of what it would be like to work in X field. To learn what that field is really like, and to learn if it's something you truly want to pursue, is a huge win in my mind for an undergraduate.

My experience says the opposite.

One group maybe wants to do something because it pays well, with no motivation because they aren't passionate.

The next group is very passionate about one or two things, and have lots of motivation. However, they seem to view that as the only option, even though more likely than not it will change and shift.

The third group has motivation to do work that is interesting, but they have know idea what to specialize in and have a few things they don't want to do. They aren't necessarily good at it all, and it's overwhelming to think about plans for the future because of the open-ended nature of that question to them.

This is what I've observed. And of course, people change between these groups all the time.

The second group are crusaders. They begin a quest for fulfillment of their working potential, usually despite their parent's advice, in anything they deem challenging (even in the same management or law as the first group, but for different reasons).

The last group are peasants. These will either be stepping on their parent's footsteps (or following anything they are being sold by their entourage actually), or will feel themselves lost and helpless.

...and I noticed that people change between these groups too.

As you age, you will find your interests, and passion will ebb, and flow. When I was in college, I was all about learning anything, and everything about medicine. Now, I don't even like disgusting lipid levels with family members.

In college I hated computing, and pretty much everything related to technology. I just didn't find much invented by man interesting. I felt like Programming was a waste of a life. I couldn't begin to comprehend how someone could stare into a screen for more than a few minutes. Now--I can't put this stuff down.

And to be completely honest, I still don't know how I want to spend my remaining days.

What we should be cultivating instead is the capacity for self-directed learning and deep motivation.

Gonna argue with this one from the standpoint of Electrical Engineering.

I would argue that almost everything up through junior year gets used every day. Basic circuits and basic digital never quits being relevant (I have pulled out a Karnaugh map every now and then to demonstrate to some programming folks that their conditionals were wrong). Basic electronics and op-amps similarly.

Once you hit junior year, the courses get specialized and don't get so much daily use--electromagnetics, digital signal processing, control systems theory, communications system theory.

The problem is that you don't know which one you like until after you take it. And before you take it, you're not useful to a company, either, so intern/apprenticeship doesn't help.

I'd actually mostly forgotten about them :) .

When I teach the class to programmers, state machines are the far more important concept I try to drive home. I use state machines all the time when programming.

For example, I have to practically threaten employees in their 20's to actually fscking pick up the phone and actually TALK to a customer rep. Yes, it can be annoying--they're going to try to sell you something as that's their job. But some of them also know what they're selling better than anybody on the planet. The only way you will figure that out is if you talk to them.

Threatening only works in the short term, right up until your best people pick up their shit and leave. In the long term it does not yield the kind of workforce you actually want to have.

And how many times am I supposed to let them order the wrong thing (at company expense) because they won't PICK UP THE DAMN PHONE AND CALL SOMEBODY? I've been mentoring interns and co-ops in engineering for almost 25 years and this set of 20-somethings is just like any other--except with respect to their absolute avoidance of using the bloody phone.

Making a genuine mistake is acceptable. Talk to the rep, order some stuff and see if it works. If it doesn't, no big deal. With the rep in the loop, it'll take one or two iterations, and you'll get what you need. After the third time I asked: "Did you call the rep?" "No." "Do it." After the fourth time: "Call the rep.". "Okay." "No, NOW. While I'm standing here. On conference." <rolls eyes> After 10 minutes of talking to the rep, he's got an order for the right stuff, the rep comped it, and sent it overnight.

The worst part--even after examples like this--THEY STILL WON'T PICK UP THE PHONE. It's absolutely infuriating. This isn't just one person getting old and complaining. It also isn't just my observation--I have heard the same complaint from different people from ages 35 to 55.

I've reached a point where I almost don't want to hire anybody in their 20's.

I agree with this bottom line, but I sense a lot of politics in there around what is/isn't called bullshit. Getting opinions when you ask for them is valuable, having to fight your way against your employees (for them to do something you are paying them for) is absolutely not.

Do any of you have any suggestions for remote interns? I tried it once and though both the student and I were motivated, the time difference was a killer. Also, I rely a lot on random interactions with my interns. I think it would require a lot more structure to pull it off...

---

A YC apprenticeship program that combines internships with YC companies with trade classes from various resources including techshop, crucible, and others.

There are so many creative people in the world that simply need mentors and resources.

The Bay Area can really provide all of this!

There are likely tens of resources I am glossing over, but if the YCcommunity is to prove that we can solve this issue, we have everything we need to do so and just need a leadership umbrella; YC, to prove it and the gumption !!

Who's willing (other than me, and I will dog food this!!)

edit: Unless you mean established former YC companies who are no longer in the startup mindset. I didn't consider that originally but then why limit yourself to YC companies if you can snag some sort of vetted supply to the Facebooks/Twitters/etc. of the world?

Trying to make the world better (with initial guidance) and solving real life problems is the best teacher of all.

College training for me, or for all the apprentices I've had over the years, was of minimal importance beyond learning the discipline of a rigorous approach. I could have started after sophomore year, and arguably done better (without having to have spent 2 more years at school, and 2 more years at a tech startup as an employee, and with 1/2 the student debt and bad cafeteria food).

But a bigger part of it is that the University must provide for oversight so that the actual tasks assigned to the students is relevant to their academic goals, and that the complexity of the tasks increases progresively in order to present the students with renewed challenges according to their growing skillset.

Without this formal oversight, the whole thing could easily degenerate in a shady personal business where the school's officials "rent" their pupil's slave labor to the highest bidder.

What about getting - gasps, the horror - and actual job as a data entry clerk? You know... something that pays you money instead of making the dean richer with your efforts?

Now go put your nose down on those damned spreadsheets. Copy from column A to column Q - no, no macros, thankyouverymuch - but convert everything to UPPERCASE, and fix typos please, unless that was not a typo, in which case don't.

And remember, the Dean already cashed the check I sent him, so you better hurry up. I want no less than 100 rows per hour. Otherwise you flunk the semester, and while you don't pay tution your parents are going to get tired of having to support your lame ass if you do not start to bring a wage home one of this years.

Is that "practical" enough for you?

I remember someone saying "It wouldn't matter if MIT only taught basket weaving as long as they still had such a thorough selection process". This holds true here. People only care about the pedigree of your degree, it's substance comes second in my experience.

That used to be the case, but now corporations require you to pass their own exam before they hire you. Let that sink in a moment. No longer are the universities taken at their word about their product.

For some of you it has never been any different, but this change came about more or less when I was teaching at university/college. Some of us saw this as a quite profound change.

In my view, that was the first signal of the beginning of the inevitable disruption of modern higher ed.

You mean an ... interview?!

Ok, that was purposely obtuse, but I don't see how an extension of a company's interview process (ensuring, through their own testing, that candidates meet the proper qualifications without school bias) is a bad thing. Or how it signals an 'inevitable disruption of modern higher ed'. Would you mind expanding on that a bit?

To me, that helps keep schools honest and continuously adapting their curriculum's, while ensure that the best candidate gets the position, regardless of the institution they attended.

In other words: Sure, you have a 4.0 in engineering from Stanford. But now let's see if you can actually compute a Fourier transform. Or even if you know when to use a FT.

To my generation, that's damning. In other words, (quoting you here) ensuring, through their own testing, that candidates meet the proper qualifications without school bias is the new normal, and it's different in a way that says we don't/can't trust the universities to deliver their product any more. The status of the universities has changed in our society, and that, in my opinion, is an early signal for a coming disruption.

IOW, it's not that schools are getting worse at teaching, it's that they are getting better at teaching, and less about filtering elites.

In my experience, the large tech companies actively recruit from select few universities (and prefer applicants from those universities). The resume screeners / sourcers are biased to look for top schools also. They often don't want to risk spending time on a candidate from a school with which they are not familiar.

Most qualified applicants never have the opportunity to prove their skills in a phone screen (e.g. coding interview). The school bias continues to exist at the resume screening stage.

It's not that different among startups (especially YC alumni).

I can't tell you how much I have urged, at times forced, my friends in CS who didn't learn programming since 7th grade (me) to do more before they graduated. Those who listened and did an intensive summer apprenticeship with a student founded web agency I worked at previously have progressed to the point where you probably couldn't tell they came from my university (which, is to say you probably never heard of it and if you got to know it, you wouldn't think very highly of it).

But it has good advice on the need to overlook people's "flaws" (if you can call them that): -----

"Hire a worldclass team" is about as helpful as telling someone to "Try their hardest." Anyone building a company likely already is, and if not, you telling them isn't going to suddenly make them try harder.

You know what's hard? Hiring a worldclass sales manager when you have a company that is trading at less than cash at the wake of the dot com bust. Astoundingly, the best sales managers in the world just weren't returning Horowitz's calls. So instead-- in one of my favorite sections of the book-- he describes hiring Mark Cranney.

It was a decision most of his board and his executive team were violently against. (Lesson to Horowitz: "No one else gets a vote.") Cranney actively made people feel uncomfortable-- not what you want in a sales guy. Horowitz describes him as physically looking like a perfect "square." But he was a savant at how to build an effective sales team.

My favorite passage is when Horowitz sat down to explain to his cofounder-- and to many, the face of the company-- Andreessen why he was hiring him:

I let Marc open the conversation...by listing his issues with Cranney: doesn't look or sound like a head of sales, went to a weak school, makes him uncomfortable. I listened very carefully and replied, "I agree with every single one of those isues. However, Mark Cranney is a sales savant. He has mastered sales to a level that far exceeds anybody that I have ever known. If he didn't have the things wrong with him that you enumerated, he wouldn't be willing to join a company that just traded at thirty-five cents per share; he'd be the CEO of IBM." Marc's reply came quickly: "Got it. Let's hire him!" That is the reality of how you hire as a startup CEO going through any degree of shit, which let's face it, they all are. Unless you are Facebook, you can't call whoever you want an offer them a job. (And truth be told, even Facebook doesn't have a 100% batting average on hiring.) You have to find the person the best at the single unique skill you need and tolerate everything else that comes with them. The reason they aren't running IBM despite their skills. That is helpful hiring advice.

(https://pando.com/2014/03/04/the-hard-thing-about-hard-thing...) ------

Anyways, personally I prefer companies using screening tests over degrees because it is more meritocratic.

i applied for several different companies for a pretty low position around 3 years ago. one of the companies was MAN and I had to pass a) an online test for preselection, b) a written exam on premises and finally b) an interview.

i fucked up in the interview, but they still mentioned that they would need at least a second interview, probably two, before seriously considering me for this position.

Case in point, it's very difficult to get hired to a German or Swiss company with a US engineering degree, regardless of the universities standing. I had to go through that myself, it's ridiculous.

Remember, George W. Bush (all politics aside, just looking at him in terms of intellectual prowess) graduated from Harvard and got his M.B.A from Yale. That's one easily identifiable example but you can find many. And then you ask yourself, if you can take a bus that size through a fortress wall, can you still call it a fortress wall? And then it's clear for what it is -- decoration. Worse: it's signalling, which is the opposite of a meritocracy.

http://keithhennessey.com/2013/04/24/smarter/

Part of my problem with American politics is that so few know how to think clearly about the actors involved. I guve Bush considerable benefit of the doubt when it comes to mental capability but I don't agree with him. And I dislike Obama for his failure to uphold the values he got elected on, not (as many feebleminded urbane Democrat voters suppose) because of his skin color.

His problem went beyond not knowing how to speak in public, which, by itself, is not a sign of not being intelligent. He was truly very dull, something he himself admitted to ("I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed").

Aside from that, if you passed through college, then through grad school and always referred to the Internet as "the internets", and to "the google", then public speaking is the least of your worries.

You may wish to rethink this.

Bush is clearly not as dumb as he was caricatured. But he certainly couldn't lead in any way on his own without daddy's entourage telling him what to do.

Think, was there perhaps a strategic reason to paint himself so?

I'd have to talk to them and explain he was a work horse extraordinaire, and was the equivalent of great project manager, programmer, and a business guy all rolled into one.

Its very common to hate successful people, who don't fit our narrative of what a hero should look like.

When asked a question, he'd never give an answer that illustrated a deep depth of analysis.

Now he certainly could have done the analysis all the time, but he never spoke about it so I did not have any insight into was his thinking process was.

Now, I never thought he was dumb but his persona of well-mannered everyman never slipped even one bit, so if it's a mask, I have no idea what is beneath it. He could be average or a genius or low intelligence with extreme charisma. I don't know.

You wouldn't either if you were talking to the general public.

If Bush is that smart, he must have good motives for those things, or if not good motive, hidden motives.

Just look at the number of people who fall within the Alan Kay camp of mutable state vs those who like Haskell.

Look at those who think Lisp should have ruled the world versus those who believe Prolog just never had a fair shake.

There's a bunch of issues that reasonable people can reasonably disagree on.

Granted when it comes to politics I believe all motivation is hidden because ture radicals can't win the vote by coming out and telling people they plan a revolution. They have to claim to be only slightly off center, then continually reframe the issue till people begin to see things their way.

Guantanamo Bay was a great example. If you'd asked Congress "do you want to authorize a secret camp to torture dissidents just offshore from the continental USA?" then they would have said no. Yet now that the camp exists, the question has been shifted to "Do you want to close our black-ops torture camp, and move all those people with grievances (legitimate or not) against us to your home state's prison system?"

Now even Congressmen who hate torture feel unwilling to go down in history as the one who let 'terrorists' into gen-pop, even if in fact our prison system is perfectly capable of handling dangerous individuals (like all the homegrown terrorists we have).

I used the wrong example: nothing creates cognitive dissonance faster than politics or religion. But, that said, it's not a show. He's quite consistent in the types of grammatical mistakes he makes, such as simple subject-verb agreement, for example, and they indicate that he's either aphasic or mildly-retarded.

'Upon its completion, Bush was promoted to the officer's rank of second lieutenant required for pilot candidates. He spent the next year in flight school at Moody AFB in Georgia from November 1968 to November 1969. The aircraft Lt. Bush trained aboard were the T-41 Mescelero propeller-driven basic trainer, T-37 Tweet primary jet trainer, and the T-38 Talon advanced jet trainer. Bush ranked 22 out of 53 students in his flight school class with a grade of 88 on total airmanship. His scores included 100 for flying without navigational instruments, 89 in flight planning, and 98 in aviation physiology. Bush also completed two weeks of survival training during this period.

Bush then returned to Ellington in Texas to complete seven months of combat crew training on the F-102 from December 1969 to June 1970. This period included five weeks of training on the T-33 Shooting Star and 16 weeks aboard the TF-102 Delta Dagger two-seat trainer and finally the single-seat F-102A. Bush graduated from the training program in June 1970. When interviewed by the Associated Press in February 2004, flight instructor Maj. Udell recalled that Lt. Bush was one of his best students saying that, "I'd rank him in the top five percent."' --http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/q0185.shtml

Note to down voters: do some research. First of all, there was widespread support for invading Afghanistan in both the US (over 90%) and in Afghanistan (also in the 90% range). This was not the case for Iraq.

Second, Iraq was based on questionable intelligence that there might be things going on there that could potentially lead to attacks on the US at some future time. Afghanistan was in response to an attack that had already occurred by groups that were operating out of Afghanistan.

Third, Congressional support for the Afghanistan invasion was 420 yes, 1 no, 10 not voting in the House, and 98 yes, 2 not voting in the Senate. For Iraq, the House was 297 yes, 133 no, 3 not voting, and the Senate was 77 yes, 23 no. FFS, even Ron Paul voted for invading Afghanistan.

There is no way you can make a plausible case that Bush supporting the Afghanistan invasion indicates low intelligence, whereas you can kind of make such a case for Iraq.

Therefore, one need not be intelligent to graduate from those schools

You may be right about your conclusion, but you don't support premise #2 -- rather, you just assume we all agree.

Why do you think he's dumb?

There is no "Exam".

If you're talking about software interviews, know that you need to have pedigree even to get an interview. See Twitter or Palantir recruiting.

> If you're talking about software interviews, know that you need to have pedigree even to get an interview. See Twitter or Palantir recruiting.

Counterexample: I currently work part-time (alongside my undergraduate studies) at very well-known Linux software company. When being interviewed, there was no mention of any "pedigree". It was simply that I had contributed to the free software project they were looking for engineers for. Simple as that. You'll find that competence is far more important than pedigree. I've always hated the concept of pedigree, it disadvantages people who have skills but are poorer than others. We ought to push for a meritocracy. As a separate matter, higher education should be much cheaper (or just make it free).

There is far more to a degree than the classes and the piece of paper with a GPA. It is also an environment where young people grow as themselves for the first time in their lives in many ways. There is also more that can be done to ensure strong job placement, like my alma mater, RIT, in requiring a full year of paid co-ops before they grant a degree.

On hiring:

There are infinite metrics that assign value to a candidate regardless of the school they attended; culture fit, for instance.

However, hiring is an expensive and labor-intensive process, and every moment an engineer is looking over resumes or conducting interviews is time that could be spent fixing bugs or creating valuable features. Pedigree, for better or worse, simplifies the decision. When you have a stack of resumes to deal with, half from small colleges you've never heard of, and the other half from, say, Cornell, whom do you prioritize?

Exactly. Education is a thing where a student voluntarily decides how much effort he/she wants to put in learning, not some software that the professor can install inside their brains. All they can do is check out their past scores to determine how dedicated a student is and only admit such high-grade students. But again, time is fickle and people do change. Lazy and lethargic students suddenly have some life-altering experience and they turn into rank-holders, the opposite can happen too!

I'm seeing this as well and am developing a learning / training platform based on this thesis for professional dev.

Do you, as a former/current educator, see things changing in the future?

Colleges and universities go up for accreditation every ten years (perhaps it varies, I'm not the world expert on this but I've been part of the process). A large part of this process is a self-study conducted by the faculty and staff of the university. In the recent (one-to-two accreditation rounds) past there have been high profile universities that have failed that process. The thing that I find interesting is that the faculty at these universities (to the best of my knowledge) don't particularly give a shit about this process. This accreditation means very little, and is not worth them putting time into. Now, accreditation by their respective professional society is quite important- the Chemistry department cares deeply about what the American Chemical Society (or whomever it is) says, but not about what the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools says. This is exactly the way that certificate programs work: Learning to be a Honda mechanic, for example, requires a program accredited by Honda, not specifically by the NCACS.

So it could be that the idea of going to a university and spending $100K on a "broad education" becomes a thing of the past for all but the true scholars, and most people start turning to specialized education for jobs like engineering and computer science. Just a hunch.

And so it reinforces itself. Intelligent people flock there because intelligent people flock there. But it also means that the time spent there is more valuable.

Nonetheless, I agree with you. Location probably is a deciding factor in a minority of people who would rather go to MIT to talk than RPI.

I find that crazy. Both teach basically the same thing. If they are both accredited, then it is almost indistinguishable.

Who would you think is smarter off the cuff, a Harvard graduate, or someone who attended an accredited community college and followed it with a masters from an accredited online school?

I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter. It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young.

Speaking just on computer science here, but the depth of CS courses varies radically across universities. Sure they all might follow the ACM model curriculum, but how much of the book you're actually reading (and which book you're using in the first place), the number and difficulty of practice problems you're assigned, etc. is definitely not basically the same.

I went to an average engineering school, and also took a handful of grad classes. Many of the assignments in Master's classes were a similar difficulty level to the assignments in undergrad MIT classes on OCW. Not all of the courses were this way, but many were.

The big difference between someone coming out of a higher-end school and a community college isn't (necessarily) intelligence or even knowledge, it's that the university educated ones have been prepared to reason about the world in a more complete way. Which is comforting for me to know when I'm hiring.

I should note: I didn't finish college (I made it through three years). My wife on the other hand went on to a PhD. At 24 I was convinced that I had missed nothing. It wasn't until about a decade later that I began to understand that she was capable of seeing so much more nuance and detail than I was. Partly because she's smarter, but partly because she had so much more substance to her education. It gives her a basis to reason from that I don't have. It's a gap I'm feverishly trying to close through completing my own education... but it sure would have been easier to have done it in my 20's...

Not necessarily. It might have required less determination to go along with what others around you were doing, but a lot of people who try learning subjects like calculus as adults report that it seems easier. They have better focus, and most important, they understand why they are doing it.

In short: it's never too late! Study on!

Other ivy league schools, not so much, at least from the watered down versions, and with some exceptions from notables (Financial Markets taught by Robert Shiller, for example)

Most schools, at least in the mooc versions, tend to be about the same level, regardless of prestige.

They should, but they don't. Teachers make a difference. I'm at a mediocre university and watching MIT lectures has made me realize I'm missing out on literally mountains of knowledge. Never mind the qualification process, spending several years with intelligent people (both students and faculty) makes a huge difference.

I went to a tech school. I also went to community college over my first summer for some basic classes. The community college classes were laughably easy and most certainly weren't anywhere near college level, and this was considered a "good" community college.

I hear that in state schools they pack 100+ people in a lecture hall for biology 101 or whatever. That seems like it would be difficult to learn that way. I went to a private school and there was no giant classes.

I'd believe that their curricula are essentially the same, but that's what's "on paper", so to speak. Even if they're both accredited, wouldn't better faculty lead to better teaching? Or better research programs and partnerships with industry? Even stricter requirements and evaluation criteria. If at least some of these aspects are true when talking about "prestigious" universities, then the bias you describe isn't that bad of a heuristic.

No. Generally, at research institutions, faculty are not chosen for their teaching ability. They are chosen for their research background. They are often horrifically bad teachers, if they even teach the class at all and don't just assign it to a TA.

It also doesn't take a world-renowned genius to teach an undergraduate or even a Master's program. It takes someone with a very solid grounding in the subject, which should be any graduate, who also happens to be a great (preferably enthusiastic) communicator.

Hiring for teaching ability they are not good at, even when they intend to.

I will have to say that I have had a few, select few, of those few bad teachers.

As a TA, I can also say that I am thankful that my professor doesn't stick the load of our lecture work on me, but I have heard from many other TAs that this does happen. From what I understand, I'm VERY lucky that I am working with am amazing teacher.

My school allows transfer credit from all of the neighboring community college.

I also have friends who attended my same high school who are attending community collage. We have traded notes on classes and it seems like we do learn the same material.

The only difference is that my school packs every class with 20+ people while their school has at max 15 people per class.

This is also very anecdotal but the teachers that I have met from their school are also most focused on helping students rather than getting all of their hours of teaching done for the week so they can continue their research.

Again, this is only my experience.

This may not be universally true, but it's something I've observed.

Good point. That was a big reason I started my education at a community college. Classes were cheap, small, and there was and agreement for automatic admission with full credit transfer between that CC and the university I wanted to attend.

In addition, the CC was also 10 miles from my home instead of the 35 miles to the university campus, which was one more reason. For me, it was a no-brainer to go to the CC for two years and then transfer.

"Smarter off the cuff"? After reading about Harvard's interview and admissions process, combined with their 98% 6-year graduation rate, I wouldn't think much about a Harvard graduate without speaking to them.

>I'm sad to say that I've been programmed to assume that the Harvard graduate is smarter.

Programmed by who?

>It is just a bias that we are all taught as we are young.

Whom are "we"?

Bryan Caplan has written much about 'signaling theory' and education in posts like this one: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...

It depends. In the limited world of software startup hiring, a compsci student that got admitted to MIT/Stanford but drops out after his freshman year conveys a more valuable signal than graduating from the University of Alabama (a much lower ranked school) after 4 years of study.

If it's an older institution doing the hiring such as IBM or Goldman Sachs, they'll want that official piece of paper showing you graduated regardless of the school's low ranking.

Edit: Excepted to accepted. Read what your damn phone types for you...

excepted = not included in the category or group specified

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...

There are many reasons to believe that college is more about signaling than knowledge. While admission is an important part of the signal (certainly at the high-end), completing college is probably an important signal in the mid-range and below. Completing college is probably associated with work-ethic, the ability to follow rules successfully, etc.

Also, I do admit, my point is made bluntly.

As an interesting anecdote, I found that when I'm around my Chinese friends or family, I'd hear the question "where did you go to school?", but when I had conversations with White or Black folks we'd talk about "what did you study?". I think that's a pretty interesting cultural nuance. For me, the second question is more wholesome.

When I explained to her that as a professor, she or I would probably teach at places other than the school she or I studied at, she conceded that maybe she too would be willing to study at a place like Harvard.

It seems in China, theres only a couple of good schools. In America, the quality of 100 or 200 of the more prominent schools is probably rather indistinguishable. I never even applied to the Ivy league schools in undergrad, I just applied to the state schools and went to the one I liked best.

Also in China, people seem to go to great lengths to prove that theyre not one of the peasants. In America, people dont seem to need to make that distinction as often, if ever.

Then there's this cultural obsession with investing into your offspring that stems back to the Imperial Exams. Hell, the words that are used for the student rankings still harken back to those practices.

Further pressure is put on the children of academics, where admission to one of the top 10 Chinese universities or an Ivy League university is used as a measurement of parenting prowess.

I've experienced the insanity from a bystander perspective, and it's not without cause. I would also like to differ on the point that Chinese people go to great lengths to prove that they're not one of the peasants. They may go to great lengths to show that they're wealthy, or for the old cultural families, to great lengths to show heritage, but there's plenty of things very well to do Chinese will do that wouldn't really go for class abroad.

The whole point of Ivy leagues has been reduced to being a hub for assembling smart/rich people at a place. This has all sorts of unintended consequences like for example, alumni network which exists solely for career benefits.

Though great works still comes out of these universities. They are not exactly making people smarter or helping ordinary people directly in any way.

They just exist to gather rich/smart people at a place, and see if they can go further.

> It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

I ran a language learning group for a couple of years and we tried many different styles of learning.

With no structure, most people flounder. Unless you already learned the material and just need it for review, it really doesn't work well.

The best was complete structure: tests, lesson plans, and homework. Most people are passive. They want a teacher to lead them and guide them through the learning process.

No structure will work with people that have the same discipline required to start a company, because they don't need someone telling them what to do.

Bull. Most people have any interest in learning beaten out of them by our crappy factory/prison like educational system. Because you know what's not conducive to learning? Having no choice as far as subjects; having no choice how long you spend on them; having no choice on who to learn from; having no choice who you learn with.

PG has a classic essay on makers vs managers on scheduling, and he places emphasis on how for work like programming, getting into the material takes time. I see no reason this wouldn't apply to learning. How much work would most developers get done if they had their day broken into 50 minute segments, five minute transition times, and six different projects they were required to work on every day with equal consistency?

My mother runs a Montessori preschool. Consistently, the kids that go off to first grade come back with stories of attending traditional school and wondering when they get to start doing something instead of sitting at their desk. Or when they can do something new instead of going through material they already know with the class. This is not to say Montessori is a perfect system - but it was actually designed with the education of children in mind, rather than efficiency from a bureaucratic perspective.

It bothers me greatly when someone blames the nature of people for problems that are systemic in nature - it feels no different from the ridiculous number of ADHD diagnoses we have these days, which seems to largely stem from not giving kids space to be kids.

Yes, the interest gets beaten out of many children due to bad schooling, but nowadays excessive usage of TV/internet/facebook/whatsapp/sports/entertainment are also equally or more responsible for that. That's where some kind of structuredness and discipline is required.

About choice - it would great if you get some of those choices - but life/Nature/society are not so kind. But one can try homeschooling. Homeschooling gives you a great deal of freedom to you as parents to offer a great deal of freedom to your kids as students in this respect. But beware of unschooling as it is not very helpful from education point of view as some amount of structuredness and discipline are a must to learn any non-trivial technical subject to a significant level of detail.

However, to have real mastery of a subject (say, Computer Science), will require you to suffer through parts of the curriculum that don't seem interesting.

I grumbled when I had to take a class that had nothing do with my major. But it changed the way I think about things. It was a great class.

Most people don't really want to choose and if given too many choices, will be overwhelmed and not get anything accomplished.

New learners of language, for example, have no idea where to start, which teacher to choose, or which subject they need to learn.

I work for myself and I've been working on my current project for over a year. There were so many times I wanted to give up and so many boring parts, but I slogged through it all, because I know the end result will be a great accomplishment.

I've met so many developers that get bored when they have to work on something that has the slightest hint of monotony. I feel like that's one of my greatest assets and I

We should encourage discipline when learning..and the method you suggested with 50 minute segments, etc does the exact opposite.

Experienced teachers know exactly what someone needs to learn to get to the point where they can learn for themselves.

This is what k-12 is all about. Once you get into college, you most definitely have the choice.

There may be students that get to this point faster..which I think is what AP classes are all about.

"How much work would most developers get done if they had their day broken into 50 minute segments, five minute transition times, and six different projects they were required to work on every day with equal consistency?"

I have no idea about other developers, but for me, not much. This sounds like a terrible way to develop any project.

"PG has a classic essay on makers vs managers on scheduling, and he places emphasis on how for work like programming, getting into the material takes time. I see no reason this wouldn't apply to learning."

The mistake here is assuming everyone has the mind of an engineer/software developer.

"My mother runs a Montessori preschool. Consistently, the kids that go off to first grade come back with stories of attending traditional school and wondering when they get to start doing something instead of sitting at their desk. Or when they can do something new instead of going through material they already know with the class"

Children shouldn't be making these decisions. When I was in school, I hated math. If given the choice, I would have played video games all day. Looking back, I'm glad I was forced to sit and learn all of those math skills that I pretty much use every day. Part of learning is memorization, which can't be skipped. Another part is having the discipline to do something you don't really enjoy, but need to do it to achieve a goal.

"It bothers me greatly when someone blames the nature of people for problems that are systemic in nature"

Systems are created around human behavior, not vice-versa. My wife learned in an environment like you envision: lots of choice and very little structured learning. Since no teacher told her what to study, she now has huge gaps in knowledge that she really has no time to make up as an adult. I would never want to put a child through that as it depriving them of their future success.

"it feels no different from the ridiculous number of ADHD diagnoses we have these days, which seems to largely stem from not giving kids space to be kids."

ADHD is over-diagnosed, but removing the structure from our current education system has nothing to do with it.

I also think that we need to teach kids to put down the ipad and phones when they are learning. Having a thousand distractions doesn't help.

But without knowing math, you'll never get very far in science and engineering. You'll never get a chance at the fun stuff.

I find the opposite -- it is impossible for me to get any kind of complex learning done while I am on a structured course. It's telling that I learned more in three weeks of being ill and choosing to passively read books on mathematics (While coughing my guts up, of course), than I did actively participating in a course. (The only reason I am participating in the course is because I need a bit of paper that says I can do foo. A few people working in foo field have said I am at their level, it's just mindless inane hoop-jumping.)

> Most people are passive. They want a teacher to lead them and guide them through the learning process.

Exactly, but IMO that is the fault of the schooling system itself. They've never had to learn anything themselves, because everything they know has been spoon-fed to them by their teachers. If we had a better (Differently structured) education system, then this would not be necessary.

Although I do not see much hope for this happening, both Russell and Whitehead made attempts to improve the learning systems in the UK, neither prevailed.

Apologies if this came across as a rant.

My example was anecdotal, however when combined with my (Also anecdotal) experiences concerning the education system, the second-hand experiences I noted, and the writings of Russell, Whitehead, Lockheart, and numerous others who also have expounded on the problems with overly structured teaching and similar methods, it provides me with enough evidence to convince me until equal evidence is provided to the contrary.

That is why I say it is not true -- or more accurately, that in my experience, it is not true. I accept that a structured environment is a requirement for some people to learn, but I dispute that it is a hard requirement, and I also dispute that it is natural for the general population to require structure to learn.

Take your average child away from that after several years of being part of it and any short term observations are going to make you think structure is critical. Before they do anything else they're going to have to learn that they don't need structure to learn and after that they're going to have to learn how to teach and push themselves.

First off, that's a circular argument. But also note that research into education is riddled with issues (such as the researchers having moral issues with blind control groups, which results in basically useless data). Our education system is based on the gut instinct of certain administrators. People who clearly would prefer a structured system where one-size-fits-all. Not that I'm saying everyone learns differently (learning styles are also mostly bullshit), I'm saying that the current system could be much better and people who do well in the current system are very motivated to do well and will gladly push with all of their force through the bullshit so they can get on with their lives.

That said there certainly are people that need structure to learn (particularly what they don't want to learn). There are several disorders or disabilities that would make unstructured learning incredibly difficult or impossible.

For me it seems to be at least partially a function of my ability in an area. The stronger I am in a subject, the less structure I need.

I suspect the optimal amount of structure varies from person to person and within a person from subject to subject. People learn differently.

They are not naturally. But society designed by people like you turned them to being passive.

Imagine people start education from start in society like this university, everyone will be excited, because they are going to do what they like.

My problem with people like you is this.you are scaling your small experience to one of the fundamental things in human kind.

Maybe passiveness in your language learning group was other where? Maybe because people was forced to be there? Because of raise? Beacsue of earning respect? Or because of something deep in their unconscious part of their mind. But I am 100% sure if they were truly there, they would have been excited.

Things are simple.if you compare them with sex.almost every bode (healthy) excited about sex. Education should be like this.free.and whenever whatever you like.

Every person is/will be excited if he/she truely become free to do what they love.

Anybody and their grandmom may be excited to do what they like; it takes education to learn to do something even if you don't necessarily like it. What he/she seems to be saying by "structured-ness" may have to do with this. Nature forces you to hunt for food, else I am happy to just keep on pondering and doing philosophy because I like it.

What happens when said group of people finds out there's such horrible things as bankrupcy, or debt collection, or evictions?

What happens when they figure out that the things everybody expects them to do to pull themselves out of the mess is complex stuff that cannot be learned on the fly, and that requires years of practice before results can be obtained by investing a reasonable amount of effort?

It is good and proper to enjoy ourselves in life, but sometimes you need to force yourself to do stuff that either you must do right now in order to avoid extremely unpleasant outcomes, or that you should do in order to position yourself for more good things to come your way in the future.

Also, while I agree that you don't need a college degree to be a successful programmer or business person, most other science professions require some sort of structured learning environment and equipment to effectively teach students.

Maybe I'm dumb and this professor is onto something. She has a degree in material sciences, so perhaps she knows first-hand that all the knowledge you need to learn advanced chemistry can be gained by someone with a garage and aspirations.

C.f. Punished By Rewards.

I am interested in how they will still teach the breadth of the subject matter.

For example, you can get a lot of work done with linear algebra without really understanding vector spaces.

I assume this method of instruction would require more teacher-student interaction to be effective. The teacher could review the student progress on a project and make a note of where the application of a new technique would be helpful. Guiding the student towards a more complete understanding of a subject.

I think this kind of approach to learning works for IT, because a) the logistics to learn it are easier to handle; but mostly because b) most IT jobs actually don't require a degree - or "degree-deserving" knowlege; most programming is "trade-school"-like knowledge.

Here's another: Maybe not everyone should even go to high school.

I picked that up somewhere between high school and end of college. Some people may be faster than me but that skill is really important.

Either that, or you don't get to vote.

Edit: The last statement was more about the ability to think critically and less about if you finished high school/college.

I think many high school courses could be pushed down into earlier education and a great deal of knowledge a university provides could be offered there.

What? Graduating from school (highschool or university) is about learning how to follow directions and play the game. To say that a degree somehow guarantees that a person knows how to think critically is ludicrous.

But you're not even making such a modest claim, you're actually claiming that it is the only way to assure people can think critically (even though it's not even a valid way to begin with). Some of us can think critically as children. Do you honestly believe just because you couldn't think critically until you were an adult, that means that hundreds of millions of people that you've never met should be forced into the same fruitless, and arbitrary indoctrination you had to undergo to become adequate in your own eyes?

Are you aware of how absolutely stupid school seems to people who are really, really smart? http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

I remember many classmates in high school that hated it and considered it a chore. They didn't play the game.

I would rather see that test applied as a prerequisite to run for public office.

Most discussion about college not being important is about the fact that we don't use anything we learned in our majors after college, but your major is hardly the important thing to learn in college.

Tech seems to be a strange exception to the rule. It's easier to get a job being self educated in tech than anywhere else it seems.

In college lectures was from a minimum of 3 hours to maximum of 5 hours depending on how many credit you took in the semester. But the actual learning happened outside of those hours and once again lectures were important only to create the base, maybe even only to provide an introduction to the base.

The existing system is broken when it comes to actual student knowledge. A lot of systems are to fault, but as the modern university has bowed to their corporate overlords in filling the pipeline of modern corporate key punchers, college has essentially become tech school for Power Point and Excel in a lot of cases.

So many of our current college students would be so much better served by tech school.

Heck, so much of this community often ends up eschewing college at large to go build something - often because the value proposition of the university model right now simply doesn't make sense.

We're always going to need people who can think - maybe a bifurcated path where a lot of our university experience returns more to a true liberal arts education.

This experience-based model wouldn't have been out of place historically. That it appears so revolutionary to us today shows how broken the current model is.

Something has to change. I'm excited to see some movement around the borders.

To apply, there is no degree or diploma requirement, and it's completely free.

The training focuses on project-based learning via a peer-to-peer pedagogy and allows students to set their own pace for learning.

IMO The 42 school is not research-oriented, but rather emphasizes practical training suited to the needs of startups.

www.42.fr

From what I've seen that sort of education is more accepted by industry than academia so its a good solution for me. Having an expansive portfolio to show is a very powerful thing.

But more than that, it would give universities a model to continue creating a range of advanced or specialized subject modules. This would allow students or employees to come back and pickup new subject modules in a more integrated way to how the whole university operates.

Also "trade schools" and / or specialty schools rarely have the same social aspects of a traditional school, which (even if you personally don't value that) is a big selling point for traditional schools. Maybe they are trying to capture some of that and mix it with the specialization of a trade school.

All speculation of course, but seems reasonable I think.

Most of us on here, I'd say, have learned through trying and experimentation and that is why we are fairly good at what we proclaim to do.

University doesn't foster that kind of understanding.

I also hate that currently I need to take 5 physics classes, an accounting class, a social sciences class, and 3 "study" classes to get my major.

You very much need a university to teach you this.

Social sciences will make you a more well-rounded person able to see past just technical concerns.

Physics and social sciences will help you understand the world around you.

And it sounds like you want university to help you write business logic for accounting software, so an accounting class will do you well.

If all you want to do is write simple code for say CRUD applications then you're right University isn't the place to learn that and a trade school would be better. In tech you already have the best trade school in the universe, the internet, and the best resume in the universe, a github.

We have learned a long time ago that letting students decide to study exactly what they want when they are 18 gives you lopsided uneducated graduates who know a tiny bit about the things they were good at already; being well-rounded is EXTREMELY valuable, even more valuable than being an excellent programmer even in tech. The hard parts of software in practice are not writing the code, they are understanding what the user/client wants and how to translate that from vague fuzzy human communication to something specific and technical.

All of those are fairly basic topics that most people can pick up in an afternoon or two. These are all things that anyone who has been programming, reading, and interacting in the field of computer science understand. I could understand someone requesting that knowledge be provided to them in a college environment.

What I object to is universities charging for the "well-rounded"-ness that you speak of. Can you please define for me what it means to be well rounded?

From what I have seen is that no, no one can define what it means to be well rounded.

What do you have to do to be well rounded? No, no one can tell me that either.

Some how having gone through a university you are proscribed this trait of being in the "know". You automatically are transformed into a scholar, a person who is now magically "well rounded".

Don't get me wrong, I think that there needs to be a structured curriculum, but only of things you need to understand make it in your respective specialization.

For me, I'd love to get into building compilers, operating systems, digital signal processing, and general software development.

For me, I'd say this is the perfect regiment for me:

  * Full understanding of the computer booting process, understanding of modern processor features.

    - Write a self hosting operating system, bootloader, and learn to write a BIOS for an example computer

 * Software maintenance and revision control

    - Following the current industry best-standard practices

 * High level math with a focus in signal processing

 * Familiarization with X top programming languages at the time of graduation

    - This should include standard formatting for each language, understanding implementation details, and full familiarization with X top used libraries and standard library

 * Understand logic and problem solving

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this. I think these are fairly rational claims that I am making. Maybe I'm completely wrong and being able to quote shake-spear will help me when I need to learn the documentation for int 0x13 when I need to load a file on a 30 year old IBM PC when fixing a kernel level bug at some company, or when I need to write software to process data coming from sensors at 100GHz.

Edit: Updated formatting.

All of those are fairly basic topics that most people can pick up in an afternoon or two.

...

I think these are fairly rational claims that I am making

Um... no. Not fairly rational claims at all.

I then go on to goof off in every class, as I am doing right this moment.

Nothing I have learned is of substance in my algorithms, computer science, or programming classes that I did not already know before I enrolled. I'm bored, and I want to learn something new.

I'm holding out for some 300 & 400 level courses, but from what I hear the courses I am looking forward to on operating systems is nothing more than "This is how you open a file in C" and the data structures classes I look forward to is basically "this is how you define a tree and how you traverse a tree".

I learned stuff in school, just not often and it wasn't due to HN - I didn't have that option back then. I had a few great classes - some with only a dozen people and great professors. A shout out to other people 12 people who might remember - "Horses are pretty".

I also have met a few teachers in other classes that have been very inspiring.

I just feel that there is something lacking. I wan't something a little more.

If you haven't even taken 300 and 400 level courses, how would you know whether "the university environment... is adverse to the development of good CS knowledge"? If that's the case, you should probably drop out of school and save some money. Just start submitting some research papers now! Your lack of a PhD won't matter once you've shown everyone how fully you know each topic.

If you really think you can understand complexity theory, algorithms, and advanced data structures in "an afternoon or two", I think about 90% of it went right over your head.

Those physics classes will teach you to think about problems abstractly. In my experience, my knowledge of physics has helped me think about algorithmic problems significantly. Even if you don't use the physics itself, it's good to learn.

The accounting might not help you so much for CS, but it could be useful. And a few liberal arts classes are always good for breadth of education, and making you realize that you can always pick up a good book and read it, and that not everything you do has to be so math and science oriented.

Also, for the record, what you would learn at a trade school would be "programming". What they teach at university is "computer science". There is a pretty serious distinction, and I don't really believe you can learn computer science properly without a formal education (even if that comes from self-studying formal books - but teaching yourself javascript is not computer science).

So do the classes on computer science and algorithms. The reason universities choose to teach those things using physics classes instead of logic class or algorithms class are just historical accidents.

>And a few liberal arts classes are always good for breadth of education, and making you realize that you can always pick up a good book and read it

You can get that for almost free at a bookstore or a library.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have skipped even more of the fluff and spent my last two years splitting my time between classes and internships instead of learning additional facts and skills that ultimately had no marketable value.

I can count on zero hands the number of times I have profited by taking those university classes not directly relevant to abstract mathematics, computer software, or electronics hardware.

The supposed value of "well rounded graduates and alumni" seems very much like self-serving propaganda now. How about instead of spending three hours a week writing literary analyses of famous books, the university sponsors and organizes three mandatory hours of weekly networking events with real workers from relevant industries? That would have been worth the tuition. To this day, I still can't understand why anyone would want to read _Walden Two_ instead of doing something more useful, like separating and categorizing all the marshmallows from a box of Lucky Charms, or removing potential airway blockages in the nasal passages with the fingers.

While this not realistic, if people were better educated about finance and understood that there really is no free lunch, the 2008 financial crisis wouldn't be as bad. Unfortunately, human nature is to say that this time it's different...

Because you should definitely be taking at least a little physics and quite a lot of math.

I just rechecked, I think I need to take Biophysics, Astronomy, and nuclear physics with 1 bridge class between the three. Why? Because.

I'd love to take the nuclear physics because that sounds fun, but and biophysics will make me claw my eyes out.

Also, for my university I for some reason need to take 3 random 300 level classes and three electives as well as 3 PE classes, 8 social science classes. I can't for the life of me justify these in my situation. To be honest, I'd trade the time I would waste on this with CS classes branching into different fields. Maybe it's just me and that I know exactly what I would like to do with my career but this seems useless to me.