You assume the primary purpose of college/university is to teach. No. In America anyway, it is mostly a credential. The prestige and exclusiveness of your uni serves as a marker of intelligence in a society in which it can be legally treacherous to give potential employees IQ tests.

I will agree that for a significant minority of students the learning and learning to teach oneself are important. I doubt the top universities do a better job of this. From that perspective I think the main advantage of the sorting is that it is easier to teach if your students fall into a narrow band of ability

It's difficult to design an education system without the following property, but nonetheless I find it an unfortunate one:

You do better at university when you already know the material, not when you use the university to learn the material. Your well-being (tied directly to gpa) depends on you not making mistakes during your coursework.

I don't know about you, but mistakes are how I learn.

very interesting point. For me the best way to learn was to do problem sets and be able to immediately check and fix my answers - to have the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them in a low stakes environment.

I had a few classes where the professor provided both a list of recommended problems in the text, as well as an answer key. The grading was solely off of tests. Circumvents the cheating problem and tries to avoid punishing you for making mistakes while learning.

HackerNews is selection bias central. I suspect the overwhelming majority of college students don't even know the term "problem set" :) Most of it is, read this book of literature and write something showing you both read it and have absorbed the latest fads in college politics and art criticism.

I wonder about that point though, although professors also pursue the universities with more prestige, did they really spend the time to acquire the title of professor for prestige?

I think a decentralized system prioritizes the professor over the administration. In fact if universities aren't meant to be areas of teaching then why have them? My approach is more cutting out that middleman which is the university.

Moreover, prestige of unis are gradually fading away, although rare, I can sort of see a future where university credentials dont matter.

Excuse my bad grammar, I write very fast and in between my work so I dont really proofread.

I think they pursue the title of professor for 2 reasons: 1) For an intellectual there is no more awesome job/life than living among and working with other such people 2) Anything below full professor and you need to find another job in 7 years

Also, university is essentially 4 years of full-time studying you can do. Spending 4 years "unemployed" while taking online courses/building your own projects/whatever would very likely look odd to potential employers (compared to a more "traditional" path).

One of the most underrated aspects of getting a degree from one of the top universities is the prestige and network that comes alongside the education. Depending on your field of study, those "extras" can be more important than the education itself (i.e. in finance)

Perhaps the purely academic aspect of universities can be replicated using YouTube tutorials but unfortunately, a self-thought person won't have the same employment opportunities as someone who holds a degree in the same field from a top university.

Good Point and one a lot of people forget.

Technical people starting on their career path can overcome some of this by contributing to open source projects for example and the on-line networks they make.

I have had several job inquiries relating to open source work I contributed so it does work.

If our local makerspace can score a little funding in there somewhere for a glass workshop, I'm sure we would love to squeeze in a small bio/chem lab to go along with that and the electronics lab. We can make most of our own equipment, and our business license ought to enable us to buy chemicals from otherwise discriminating suppliers.

To put things in perspective financially, we appear to be sustaining ourselves on $40/mo memberships, with materials sold at cost for members. Projects for the outside world are expected to bring revenue in to the group, with a suggested minimum price of 2x material cost, unless they are for a charity or a primary/secondary school.

Coursera is maybe not a great example - they don't even vet their courses before starting to sell them, and they won't necessarily offer refunds if you want to drop a disappointing course partway through. It's full of courses with two weeks of 'intro' material which references the exciting things which will (not) be taught in future weeks, and it seems more like a diploma mill or collection of half-baked blog posts than any sort of real education. I've had overwhelmingly negative experiences with them.

EdX is a quality platform, though, and MOOCs in general could fill that role.

The Coursera/edX model is a university that is 100% administration -- they themselves employ no academics on a continuing basis at all.

True, what I'm proposing is not a full manual administration. I see software really as the thing that relieves people of a lot of manual supervision or administration by physical people. I also wrote an article before on the idea of Blended Learning and that I think its far more effective than physical or online learning, Coursera was just a similar comparison that I could use like "Uber for dog-walkers".