Light posting ahead. D and I will be on vacation / proper-honeymoon-after-five-years for the next couple of weeks. Aloha!
Dave Clary requests my response to Alex Tabarrok’s essay “College Has Been Oversold” in Marginal Revolution.
I think this is the article’s central thesis (especially since it is the last paragraph):
College has been oversold. It has been oversold to students who end up dropping out or graduating with degrees that don’t help them very much in the job market. It also has been oversold to the taxpayers, who foot the bill for these subsidies.
In situations like this, I always like to go back to first principles, i.e. the assumptions of the author and ones we foist on ourselves as a society and take for granted. These are that:
1) College degrees should cost an arm and a leg,
2) Colleges are supposed to prepare you for jobs,
3) These jobs are actually viable any longer or in the long run, and
4) Innovation can emerge from having a college degree, and especially from studying science, technology, engineering and math alone in college.
All four of these assumptions are complete and utter bullshit.
1) The staggering cost of college: Forget what the sheep market can and does bear. If more people want and vie for the same degree program, its exclusivity, i.e. its value, goes down and so should the cost with it. I can guarantee you that the quality of my undergraduate geology program was 10 times higher when I graduated back in 1998 and, guess what, it cost 10 times less. The more a university becomes an automated process of putting students on a conveyor belt and stamping their foreheads with Approved! at the end of a typical four-year term, the less it should cost. Unfortunately, like any growing corporation, universities’ administrations grow exponentially with the increase in students and that’s where the majority of college tuition goes. Deal with this problem first before complaining about the burgeoning costs of “useless degrees” and the taxpayer’s burden. Again, if you paid a ton to send your kid to Harvard or Stanford, well bully for you, but guess what, the University of Michigan ranks 18 and University of Wisconsin ranks 26 in the world and cost a lot less. You bought your kid pedigree, but don’t ever pretend they’re better-educated.
2) That college == jobs: I addressed this recently in Learning How To Learn.
… the meaning of a university has been corrupted to the point where the majority of students learn to a certain extent the works of others who did the research and, having achieved a very expensive pass from the gatekeepers, go off into the world to make it. This is unacceptable and look at where it’s landed us on education forecasts and economically.
The “college must prepare you for existing jobs” philosophy of education is evil because of its negative-feedback-loop nature. If college prepares you for existing jobs, then existing jobs are all you are prepared for. This is what we should be building instead:
… every single university student should leave college not just with information but with the abilities to, over the course of their lifetimes, teach themselves a million times as much information in the absence of a teacher and to find a teacher again should the need arise. Learning how to learn is getting and growing the toolset with which to take any concept, old or new, apart and to put it back together the same or as something completely new and/or different. In other words, knowing scientific results is important, but how to arrive at those and new states of knowledge is most critical.
3) That these jobs for which we prepare our scientists, technologists and engineers with their fantastic, focused STEM degrees are going to be around forever: I touched upon this in the previous point, but the short-sighted nature of college as higher-brow vocational training is the whole reason we have to stop this train and get off. Put aside for a minute the more exalted purpose of a university to educate and illuminate, period. Let’s look at my situation and tell you why I worry: I am a self- and college-educated geoscientist with two graduate degrees, one in geology, the other in computational sciences and geophysics. I work in the offshore deepwater hydrocarbons sector of the energy industry, am pretty good at what I do and am rewarded handsomely for it. Yay for me. What if another horrible Macondo incident happens tomorrow? What if onshore shale gas takes off and leaves deepwater oil and gas in its fumes? What if some whiz kid discovers a super-clean and renewable source of energy that puts the entire fossil-fuel sector out of work? Not only is my industry slowly bankrupted and my colleagues and I out of work, whole university departments and foundations go with it. And where will we go next? What are we prepared for? I don’t at all suggest that we not dedicate educational and human resources to, for example, oil and gas research and the development of those who work for the current energy industry, but the level of over-concentration in currently-successful technologies on the part of young students that is called for today is dangerous. Such blinders are the stuff of economic collapse. It’s already happening.
4) That offering degrees only to those entering STEM disciplines and sending them off to STEM jobs will somehow lead to innovation BECAUSE LOOK AT THE INDIANS AND THE CHINESE BLARGH BRAIN DRAIN ARGH: First of all, the Indians and Chinese aren’t innovating. They’re damned good at copying a technology and making it slightly better and cheaper, but that ain’t innovation. Their primary and secondary education systems require rote memorization, which is alright, but so do their college degree programs which have no real arts and humanities programs to speak of, and that is brain death. India and China, but mostly India, are discovering that education without creativity isn’t enough.
Workers at every level benefit from an education that emphasizes creative thinking, communication, and teamwork–the very kind of excellence already offered at top American colleges. Once in the workforce, the U.S. should take a leaf from the Indians, and steadily train and update practical and technical skills.
Only one Indian university made the list of Top 400 Universities In The World (IIT-Bombay) and American universities dominated the top 100. That’s because this particular ranking was based on the diversity of programs, the quality of original research and quality of teaching. Americans are, by the very nature of our definition as a nation, creative people. What we lack is academic rigor at the elementary and secondary education levels and this will not be achieved by underestimating the IQs of our young or via preparing them for standardized tests. A firm grounding in the basics and creative thinking first followed by more creative thinking later in college is the ticket to success.
And innovation from all this college-jobs nonsense? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Hart and some of the brightest computing minds I know dropped out of college and have done just fine for themselves.
Do yourself a favor? Take a year off after high school like I did, work a couple of jobs to survive and really, really meditate on whether your going to college is worth the money and time. I could have taught myself computer science but needed teachers and access to the field and labs for geology while a college education didn’t cost two lifetime salaries back in the 1990s, and that is the only reason I entered a university.
So, yes, you can say colleges are oversold, but not for the reasons Tabarrok’s article will have you think. If we have suggestions for American higher education of such vehemence, let them talk first and foremost of a realignment of our educational and economic priorities and associated long-term overhaul.
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Related:
Good | Was This Professor Fired For Requiring Students To Think?
Yesterday, Google released the overhaul of its feedreader, Reader, which features increased integration with Google’s relatively new answer to Facebook, Google+. If you like auto-spamming your Facebook or Google+ timeline with links to articles minus context or, in general, do not think of the internet as a space in which to share information in a thoughtful and meaningful way, stop reading now. If you are tired of another company’s sorry attempt at imitating Facebook in the absence of a proper platform and especially don’t want it interfering with great features that work for you and your community of friends, colleagues and readers, keep going. Even better, if you work at Google or know someone who does*, there are a few suggestions below that I would like implemented to make the internet a happy and safe place for information sharing once again.
I use Reader to:
– quickly access and read the latest blog posts and online magazine articles from feeds that I have bookmarked in the reader,
– organize these feeds into the folders of Geology, Geophysics, New Orleans, Science, Science Blogs, Technology and Visualization; share links to individual folders (bundles) with interested parties;
– share specific blog posts or articles either on Shared Items or by publishing them to this blog inside the Recommended Reading sidebar widget (simple list of hyperlinked titles of shared items) ALL IN ONE CLICK and
– share and DISCUSS items inside Reader with a specific group of WILLING followers who can passively join my Followers list and I theirs.
Now:
– access is really slow with increased load times; furthermore, the feed refreshes and displays the latest set of posts while you’re still reading previous ones,
– folders are still there and users can still create and share bundles,
– you +1 (instead of share) a post which then goes to a +1 page on your Google+ profile (complete with a Buzz tab that we are warned will be going away in a few weeks). Note that you not only have to create a non-pseudonymous Google+ profile in order to share Reader items, but also have to point your friends, colleagues and readers to the location of the +1 page, and
– once you’ve publicly +1ed the Reader item of interest, you have the option (which works on a PC desktop, works for crap on a PC laptop and not at all on an iPad) to create a post on Google+ to let your Circles know that you, Google+ user, have shared yet another article which is going to take up more of their screen real estate than is really warranted.
This, i.e. what used to be feedreader + Twitter + del.icio.us + publishable outside of Google space + all self-contained in terms of size and community,
has become this for archival:
along with this for sharing and discussion:
Instead of going from my blog to the article, the pathway has now become my blog –> my Google+ +1 list –> the article or my blog –> my Google+ stream –> the article. Archival? That’s right out the window.
Because all we need are more gates and gatekeepers between us and the information.
The Official Google Reader Blog explains these changes: “Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.”
I don’t understand why Google has to cancel one set of features in favor of another, unless it is to force users into Google+. Some argue that the social integration with G+ is something that they look forward to, which is great, but why not host a +1 button for G+ users as well as a Share button for those who do not want to utilize Google products socially?
Which brings us to the fundamental difference between the two: signal to noise. As I said on a G+ post this morning to which not a soul responded (probably because it drowned in the sea of re-re-re-re-re-shares of Rick Perry’s “drunk” speech – QED):
Along with the tremendous amount of white space, the signal-to-noise ratio of content is already very low at Google+ which is why I also don’t hang out at Facebook much other than to comment on other folks’ posts (when I find them in the noise there) or to make short throwaway posts myself. Now, folks sharing their Reader items here without context makes it even more noisy and unreadable.
Congratulations, Google, you have succeeded in sacrificing internet meaning – content in context – for more internet clutter in a silly attempt to reproduce Facebook, and in the process really pissed off a bunch of scientists, bloggers and internet users who, until yesterday, happily utilized Reader as a staple of simple, one-click, high signal-to-noise sharing and discussion. You just can’t have this in Plus.
Garrett Guillotte sums up for me:
Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.
Some suggestions for Google:
1) Please help us publish our +1s outside of Google+ via a “shared feed.” All you have to do is build a “Share This On Your Blog” embed utility into the +1 page.
2) Please replace the “Note In Reader” bookmarklet with a +1 bookmarklet. What if I want to +1 an article published on a website that doesn’t use +1 buttons? And, no, they’re all not going to add the +1 button to their websites/pages, just like they didn’t “Facebook This” or “Tweet This.” Give it up.
3) Can we go back to refreshing feeds as we did two days ago? I would really appreciate the page not cutting to all white and then repopulating itself with new material, all while I am in the middle of reading something.
4) Please don’t let this become your version of what Yahoo! did to GeoCities.
Functionality over mediocrity. Tremendous usefulness over killing useful features. These should be internet mantras. Ultimately, there is just no need for another Facebook, which is itself far from perfect (and, in fact, on the quest to completely confuse the hell out of its users). But, a utility that can be Facebook, feedreader, Twitter and Pinboard/delicious to many and in the doses that they want? Now THERE is a gamechanger.
Who do you want to be, Google? Figure that out first.
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* The guy who engineered the Google+ Circles model and I went to the same high school years apart. And what am I going to say? “Hey, fix this or I’ll stuff you in your locker.” We were a bunch of nerds who would have all been stuffed in lockers in a normal high school and we didn’t even lock our lockers.
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Related:
Brian Shih | Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? “The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.”
Pinned to the wall outside my office today and likely to stay up there until the cross-plots I’m generating behave.
