Without acceptance criteria -- some neutrally-given test that yields a yes or no -- you can't really measure the function of something. Education has been notorious for refusing to create or abide by acceptance criteria.
So it becomes a brand-name game. You pay for the brand, you spend some time getting indoctrinated (most likely to how important this particular brand is) and you get your piece of paper.
Somebody said once that the purpose of education is to create new habits. So, for instance, if you are an English speaker and develop a habit of reading a good Russian novel once a year, that might be an excellent habit to have. Or if you develop a habit of reading a dozen computer books a year, or perhaps you develop a habit of cross-checking politically-slanted stories you agree with. And so on.
Lots of great habits that you can form. Some subset of these constitute what we call "critical thinking," which everybody seems to think is important. There are a bunch of entrepreneurial habits that I'd love to make sure folks had. If you want a job after college, developing great people, marketing, and networking habits would be awesome.
But I don't think anybody wants to seriously start talking about what habits college graduates should mostly exhibit. To do that would cause controversy. Colleges are very much dependent on public dollars (at least in the states) and I don't think they are ready for the political firestorm that would occur once you start actually trying to define the thing that we're all paying for.
It's not a bubble, except for the part about more and more money goes for less and less return. The problem is that there is no "thing" that is being returned. There's no bad guys here, but it's much more like a con: you pay increasing amounts of money for this intangible thing where there's no real way to determine if what you got was what you wanted. You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary. In fact, as time goes on they get more and more insistent that this thing is absolutely necessary -- at any price.
That kind of building up of expectations, then jacking the price, then delivery of something that could roughly be considered what was needed but isn't enough, repeat-and-rinse, is much more indicative of a con (Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply intent here, and I also don't mean to imply outright fraud. Just trying to find the best metaphor. I also realize that I am making a large generalization, and all generalizations are false. Caveat Emptor.)
> You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary.
This isn't like buying a car or a house. My degree has no monetary value, as far as I can tell. I'd love to sell it to the highest bidder, but it's non-transferable. I essentially purchased a license from my university. This license (read: degree) entitles me to say that I completed a program there.
The seller isn't keeping me in the dark. I got exactly what I was promised: the license to say that I completed sufficient coursework for the school to confer a degree upon me.
The license does not explicitly certify that I have any knowledge. It simply does not make that claim.
At the end of the day, the degree is simply a license to add another line to my resume. What's that worth to me? I guess it's up to society to decide, but so far it's not been worth very much for me.
Personally, I think that I would have been better served using the money in almost any other way.
In my opinion, there's already a term for all this debate around the education 'bubble': "Buyer's remorse".
In my opinion, there's already a term for all this debate around the education 'bubble': "Buyer's remorse".
Half of it is buyers' remorse, the other half is sour grapes. There are three types of people in the world: those who went to university and are glad, those who went to university and regret it, and those who didn't go to university and want to be reassured that they didn't miss anything important. Only folks in the latter two categories are writing articles on this subject. (Oh, and the occasional embittered professor who thinks things aren't nearly as good as they were in his day.)
I think this is a vast overstatement. As a potential employer, it's in my best interests to have colleges create the best applicants possible, regardless of my personal college status. As a parent, it's in my interest to have any sort of college investment I might make to pay off. As a taxpayer, it's in my best interests to get the best return for our government investment.
To put this entire debate in terms of whether the person speaking has attended college or not is really stretching logic a bit too far. Lots of other reasons to evaluate a college education one way or another.
I think you're walking a fine line here. Especially with this sour grapes remark, it almost seems as if you're saying "these folks didn't get/enjoy college. This is the reason they say what they do. Therefore their opinion is biased and you needn't listen to them."
Sticking somebody in a bucket and then explaining away everything they might say because of the bucket they're in? Sounds to me like one of those logical fallacies everybody loves to quote so much.
He isn't just sticking you in a bucket randomly. Your language on the subject has an emotional edge that goes beyond dispassionate observation that college education may be overvalued. It actively pushes the reader toward the conclusion that you actually do have a dog in the fight, and the college system has somehow wronged you.
I don't know if it has, but based on said language, I'd be surprised if it hadn't.
My perspective:
Having gone to CMU CS, which on the one hand doesn't have particular brand recognition outside CS, but on the other hand is fairly good at CS as undergrad programs go, I believe I can say that I probably did get 100k and possibly even 200k of value out of the education, quite aside from the piece of paper. A lot of the teachers I had were really seriously excellent (and I don't say that lightly), and I wouldn't have been able to learn from teachers that good in that array of subjects (field theory, abstract algebra, robotics, cryptography, etc) as well in any other situation. Yes, I could have read wikipedia and the lkml and so on, but, having done both, classes from really really good teachers work better.
On the other hand, I think I got lucky not only in terms of the ratio of program strength to brand recognition, but also in which teachers I got within the university; if I had taken different classes in different semesters, I believe I could have done a lot worse. Not remotely all the teachers were good or even passable. And, I could easily imagine getting very little value out of the experience, and I bet a lot of people, particularly ones at big-brand institutions, do overpay for the education they get.
The point is, it's a complicated question. There clearly is some value in some undergrad programs, and there also clearly is a problem with rising prices. Comparing it to a con scheme is not really doing it justice.
I'd bet that the net present value of your CMU CS experience is quite a bit higher than you estimate.
As a credential, it's very well known in tech-heavy industries and will help open doors there. Further, it's a good enough school that it will help open doors if you decide to pursue a graduate degree in the future.
As an experience, you got the opportunity to work with top professors and it sounds like you actively sought them out to get those experiences. Further, you almost certainly got to know a lot of students and if you were smart, reliable and hard-working, likely created a situation that could open professional opportunities in the future.
I'll concede that the correlation between a conferred degree and the value captured by the student is not perfect, and that a degree is not the only opportunity to capture value between the ages of 18 and 22. But I largely believe the "debate" consists largely of overblown, hyperbolic rhetoric and oversimplification.
That may be true, but I think there's more to the "regret" group.
Consider this: I have a degree, so it's in my economic best interest to try and inflate the importance of that degree in the job market.
I can do that by trying to raise the status of my school (see: alumni donations) or by putting down those without degrees (see: degree requirements for jobs). In practice, I'm so disgusted by the entire system that I don't have any desire for my degree to have importance.
This strange thing that's happening is that people with degrees aren't defending them nearly as vigorously. I think the reality is finally setting in that having a degree is not a good discriminating factor for employment. This is awkward to the large group of people who only sought a degree for better career opportunities. Like angry rioters, one possible (though perhaps illogical) course of action for the degreed-but-unemployed might be to tear down the facade of the degree.
I don't have a college degree, and I'm glad I don't as that would have been waisted time -- but I had to interview people, and the quality of people coming from a certain university in my city is much higher than the rest of the bunch.
I even go as far as thinking that there might be something wrong with people not having a degree, so I definitely bring the point up in interviews.
But a degree can also work against you. If the quality of a university is known to be poor, the candidate would be better off not mentioning it in resumes. So it's definitely about branding.
People complain about the unfairness of the latest trends in regards to contributions to open-source, which look really good on people's resumes. But a portfolio of works released to the public works much better for software developers that a shitty university. On the other hand, whenever I hear MIT or Berkley, my eyes lighten up.
So having (or not) a degree depends on lots of factors.
There are three types of people in the world: those who went to university and are glad, those who went to university and regret it, and those who didn't go to university and want to be reassured that they didn't miss anything important.
I'll just note here that this statement appears to be true of every conceivable activity. Every person either did do it--in which case they're either glad or they regret it (or they're indifferent; we could express their satisfaction with a real number)--or they didn't do it, in which case they probably would like to feel that they made the right choice--and "didn't miss anything important" is a way of saying this.
Hmm, I should probably add the stipulation that it must be difficult to change your decision and do the activity. Otherwise there's no possibility of regretting missing it, 'cause then you'd just go and do it.
I've never attended more than a couple of classes of college -- and I can't even remember which ones I've finished, if any, and which ones I didn't -- and I'm quite ashamed of that. And publicly so, too.
If I succeed, I will tell people that I did so in spite of not going to college, not because I didn't go.
It's not wrong for me to say that college wasn't for me. I'm only slightly less of an arrogant, self-important know-it-all outspoken jackass than I used to be; but I can, and do, express regret that I never got those qualities under control enough to go to college and come back out with a degree.
You forgot the fourth kind: people who didn't go to university and are glad. If they're writing articles, it's not sour grapes. They're saying, "told you so."
The license does not explicitly certify that I have any knowledge. It simply does not make that claim.
I don't get this. Although I'm not a big fan of the higher education system, a degree from an accredited institution implicitly asserts that you have received a passing grade in the relevant courses, whether that is determined by exams, project work, or whatever. That's why accreditation is such a big deal; a degree from an unaccredited school is heavily discounted in the employment marketplace.
It's not that education doesn't want acceptance criteria; rather, any criteria that could be defined could easily be gamed.
To nearly every professor I've met, the criteria should be something similar to this: A student is introduced to a wide variety of subjects and challenged by a variety of views outside of the cultural bubble in which the student was born; such so that an undergraduate student leaves better prepared to participate in educated society and make wise decisions in civic and public discourse. Secondly, a student has been immersed in a discipline to the extent that they can read and understand literature in the field, and that student can apply the training in learning one field to conquer further fields in their future life outside of academia.
In other words, the goal of college is to create a "well-rounded" individual who has "learned how to learn" and has "seen the world past the one in which they were raised."
Now, how do we operationalize this? Note that Doctoral students have comprehensive exams and dissertations. Colleges are obviously not averse to testing. A multiple choice exam isn't going to cut it here, though.
To nearly every professor I've met, the criteria should be something similar to this: A student is introduced to a wide variety of subjects and challenged by a variety of views outside of the cultural bubble in which the student was born; such so that an undergraduate student leaves better prepared to participate in educated society and make wise decisions in civic and public discourse.
I am rather iffy on this idea, it seems like an excuse for indoctrination. More often than not, the "views outside of the cultural bubble in which the student was raised" turn out to be "the professor's own views", with other other views getting sorely neglected.
edit: It also arrogantly presupposes the professor's intellectual environment to be less bubble-like than the students'. Anyone who has spent time around professors knows this is unlikely to be true.
Education usually blasts away many natural preconceived notions about the world. It makes engineers run tests and scientists run experiments. What better way is there to get people to question their own knowledge but by showing them other viewpoints?
It also arrogantly presupposes the professor's intellectual environment to be less bubble-like than the students'
I think the professor's intellectual environment is a different kind of bubble. Maybe it's a higher level of dogma, but we need students to believe in themselves while simultaneously understanding that what they believe could be wrong.
> Education usually blasts away many natural preconceived notions about the world.
In some cases, agreed. However, in other cases, it seems to do just the opposite: it seems to introduce new or enhance pre-existing biases and philosophies. From my perspective, it appears to happen most often with the so-called "soft" sciences, and most especially in things like literature and gender/race and non-mainstream sexual studies. There's very much a cult-like aspect to some academic fields, making them have more of the characteristics of a religion than of science.
Math and hard sciences also introduce and enhance pre-existing biases and philosophies and exhibit cult-like qualities--for example, a belief that other disciplines are less intellectually important or serious.
Don't get me wrong, math and the hard sciences certainly provide extremely important and foundational knowledge, but the prevalence of egotism and nerd machismo in these fields is as obnoxious to me as the flakiness that can be found in 'softer' fields.
Alas, I agree that it's all a big ripoff anyway. Just another entrenched, obsolete business model waiting to be put out of its misery.
Problems regarding close-mindedness of different disciplines are complaints shared among the educated.
But some uninformed people believe many things that are factually unsupported (vaccine myths, economic myths, etc). These are not things that educated people argue about. People who argue without any factual or reasonable theoretical basis do not better our society.
Unless you're going to charge that students are being judged on their conclusions and not on their process, or are being indoctrinated to a particular viewpoint rather than exposed to and challenged by various viewpoints in the service of cultivating critical thinking tools, I don't think the issues raised cause any problems.
The fact that professors may live in their own cultural bubble isn't a problem so long as they are competently presenting views to are new to the students.
The primary goal is to develop the tools necessary to critically examine any incoming view. Not to simply be exposed to some representative panoply of views. Any such array of views will inevitably be incomplete (due time, if nothing else) and the evenness of their presentation inevitably open to challenge.
So if failings of variety or fairness in presentation are deal-breakers, we're essentially throwing out any possible real-world examination of such topics, regardless of the particular bent of a particular professor or institution.
Because, of course, people are completely incapable of forming their own opinions when given a set of arguments. :)
The point is that the student is exposed to multiple viewpoints, and gains experience interacting with various arguments. That even includes weird things like queer theory (which I must say, makes a lot of sense as a gay man. I can't say how much it would relate to someone cisgendered and straight.)
So it becomes a brand-name game. You pay for the brand, you spend some time getting indoctrinated (most likely to how important this particular brand is) and you get your piece of paper.
Somebody said once that the purpose of education is to create new habits. So, for instance, if you are an English speaker and develop a habit of reading a good Russian novel once a year, that might be an excellent habit to have. Or if you develop a habit of reading a dozen computer books a year, or perhaps you develop a habit of cross-checking politically-slanted stories you agree with. And so on.
Lots of great habits that you can form. Some subset of these constitute what we call "critical thinking," which everybody seems to think is important. There are a bunch of entrepreneurial habits that I'd love to make sure folks had. If you want a job after college, developing great people, marketing, and networking habits would be awesome.
But I don't think anybody wants to seriously start talking about what habits college graduates should mostly exhibit. To do that would cause controversy. Colleges are very much dependent on public dollars (at least in the states) and I don't think they are ready for the political firestorm that would occur once you start actually trying to define the thing that we're all paying for.
It's not a bubble, except for the part about more and more money goes for less and less return. The problem is that there is no "thing" that is being returned. There's no bad guys here, but it's much more like a con: you pay increasing amounts of money for this intangible thing where there's no real way to determine if what you got was what you wanted. You don't really know if it's worth what you spent, because the seller is purposely keeping you in the dark about the value, continuing to assure you that this type of purchase at these rates is absolutely necessary. In fact, as time goes on they get more and more insistent that this thing is absolutely necessary -- at any price.
That kind of building up of expectations, then jacking the price, then delivery of something that could roughly be considered what was needed but isn't enough, repeat-and-rinse, is much more indicative of a con (Disclaimer: I don't mean to imply intent here, and I also don't mean to imply outright fraud. Just trying to find the best metaphor. I also realize that I am making a large generalization, and all generalizations are false. Caveat Emptor.)