You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it.

Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration with other students. You have access to internship opportunities or to your professor networks.

I once worked through a distributed systems project from MIT. I worked almost full time on it for a couple of weeks. Most of the material was available, but not everything. You certainly don't have the same resources students have. And you don't have the same pressure students have. Also, this project had zero value on my resume. It would be different if MIT could grade it for me, and certify I did well.

Exactly. Even as a self-taught developer, one of my biggest regrets is how little I appreciated the incredible resources I had available at university and didn't really take advantage of or appreciate.

1. For classes requiring user testing or behavioral experiments, assignments are being processed through mechanical turk.

2. The experimental physics lab is changing from a 'choose-your-own-adventure' model of choosing a final project to a satellite/telemetry/astronomy project.

3. Some classes are providing synthetic datasets or data from previous semesters for lab classes.

4. Some classes are basically finished. It is actually impossible to continue teaching them, so they're purely instructional or seminars, at this point.

A lot of these lab classes are required to graduate, too. They also require so many resources that they can only be taught once a year. It's seriously demotivating, especially for passionate hands-on learners. And paying sticker price doesn't help the sting for many students.

For example, I had an undergraduate thesis in my major, which required being physically in a lab and having access to a machine shop. In any case, there are lab/project classes throughout a lot of STEM majors that students aren't going to be able to reasonably finish this semester. I don't know how this is being typically handled with everyone having to drop things ~ 1 month into the semester.

Except for the occasional "gotchas" where professors say something random in class that shows up on the exam, it didn't adversely impact my GPA, and it saved a ton of time. I think I learned more efficiently on my own, which led to saving a ton of time shuffling from physical location to physical location. It freed up more time for working, exercising, and sleeping.

Given this experience, in retrospect, I think the most valuable parts of my education were not necessarily the classroom, but rather:

50%: The (well-written) syllabi. They point out which resources (books, blogs, websites, etc) are worth your time, if you have an interest in the subject. The best ones are filled with opinions, and "optional resources if you want to dive deeper into X". Even the lazily-constructed ones are a great foundation if you have no idea about how to begin learning X.

25%: The classmates and TAs. Oral/written feedback, delivered efficiently and with empathy is not essential, but a great catalyst to development. This one's a bit personality-dependent, for other's it might be higher or lower.

25%: The assignments, projects, and deadline pressure. To learn things, you really need time-spaced practice. Reading is not sufficient. The deadline and grade pressures erode as you get better, but they're invaluable early on.

I think that you can get 90% of each of these online, just fine. But that's me! It might require personal conversation for others, but in my experience a good collection of reading and tasks, some form of IRC, and rudimentary deadline pressure are more than sufficient to replace the classroom for self-starting individuals. I think Coursera's relative success proven that case.

Do you have any pointers to online examples of syllabi you found useful? My syllabi are always to the point and focussed on the structure of the class; it's never occurred to me that someone might want to use them as a roadmap for independent learning, and I'd be interested in facilitating that.

BTW via Coursera (perhaps only through white label?) you can enroll at some universities and get an ordinary degree (no qualifying language like “online”, join the alumni association etc). So you can get that benefit from some online programs, though perhaps not the top echelon.

Despite that, I agree with you that the realtime meatspace stuff is at least 50% of the value for the higher end schools (say “top” 100, however you define “top”).

This is hugely important not just on the CV. The feedback you get from grading helps you understand what mistakes you made, and the prospect of receiving an official pass or failure grade is a big incentive to work hard.

I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here.

People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information.

But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions.

It’s chances to interact in larger groups.

It’s resources which can’t be shared online at all (libraries, information terminals, printers.)

There are also people who depend on interacting with people to process ideas.

All of this modulated by the degree.

If you are doing some courses, you very much depend on interacting with people - doing a negotiations module online is very different from an in person class to pick an example.

And fundamentally- human brains on average are designed to work with people.

Mine isn’t, and being at home and studying isn’t a bad deal- but i would cease being objective if I didn’t recognize that there are many ancillary and direct benefits to studying in college, and for some people in person studying is the only way they can achieve it.

Finally I present to the people here Blooms 2 Sigma problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem

People sorely sorely underestimate what “education” is actually about.

I got my undergrad in Nuclear Engineering, and I learned to use Gamma Ray Spectrometers costing easily 30,000 dollars and did Plasma Physics experiments in a Vacuum Chamber setup of similar cost, all the while supervised by people who knew how to safely perform experiments with radioactive material and comply with relevant government regulations. And I was mainly about Computational Neutron Transport - I got what was considered a bare-minimum grounding in Experimental Nuclear Science. This is to say nothing of programs with research reactors students can use for experiments (whose ranks my alma mater sadly left just as I arrived).

This was basically true of all the non-CS engineering disciplines. Perhaps one could cobble together an equivalent to a Mechanical Engineering or Civil Engineering degree from my alma mater with CnC Routers at Hackerspaces and the like. But I really can't imagine that working for Nuclear, Aerospace, Biomedical, the Semiconductor side of EE...

Or rather, I can, but it would require an enormous investment into high-fidelity simulation of the relevant equipment. And that is a dangerous road. At the moment, we verify Engineers' ability to use equipment in a very robust way - having them actually use the equipment to perform engineering tasks and measurements. If you rely instead on training simulators you need to be extremely vigilant about their fidelity (and you will almost certainly fall back on minimum duration of instructor-monitored usage of real equipment, like the nuclear and aerospace industries require).

Are the civil engineers running the local water treatment plant -- which can't seem to get enough qualified people -- going to hire people who don't meet the requirements to be called an "engineer" (unlike the US, these reqs are like doctors and lawyers).

If anything, the two-sigma problem argues against in-person teaching. Mastery based learning requires that a student prove that they have mastered the current concept before they are allowed to move on to the next concept. That is much easier to do in an online setting, where each student can be presented with customized material, than it is to do in a class of 30-or-so bored undergraduates.

For certain gen ed classes, maybe have the whole cohort in a single class, not for lectures or exams, but for discussion and collaboration. Make those courses fully project based and assign them uniformly across degree boundaries.

Right now, graduate level courses and prestigious institutions are the only ones even trying to offer a higher education. The majority of universities at this point are paper mills, rushing hundreds or thousands of students through programs without most of the benefits you described. It’s a system optimized for making money or university survival, rather than student achievement or societal benefit.

That immediately makes it clear to people that we dont have the money or people to afford that outcome, and after a few traversals on that ladder, the issue of education being a huge method to minimize the cost to educate people without overloading on number of teachers and cost of HR becomes apparent.

Mentorship is my new educational holy grail today frankly. Gone is the hope of the MOOC, now we need the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a mentor that customizes information that matches a student.

Fundamentally though people learn through play, thats how humans are designed.

Kids pick up 5000 combinations from playing league of legends, and do stupid number crunching on the fly.

However play is to hard to create, because we don't associate fun with a lot of work.

If we ever solve education, it will be solved by using play, even Mentors must understand fun.

In case you didn't get the reference: https://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/11/building-young-...

> Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well that nothing the philosopher learned at Stanford will be relevant to this job.

If the value of education was the information taught in the classes or the network, you should see a somewhat linear increase of value as you progress. For instance, after completing your second year out of four, you should receive ~50% of the college premium.

> Most of the salary payoff for college comes from crossing the graduation finish line. Suppose you drop out after a year. You’ll receive a salary bump compared with someone who’s attended no college, but it won’t be anywhere near 25 percent of the salary premium you’d get for a four-year degree. Similarly, the premium for sophomore year is nowhere near 50 percent of the return on a bachelor’s degree, and the premium for junior year is nowhere near 75 percent of that return. Indeed, in the average study, senior year of college brings more than twice the pay increase of freshman, sophomore, and junior years combined. Unless colleges delay job training until the very end, signaling is practically the only explanation

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c...

Well, or employers think people drop out due to poor grades.

Three years of 4.0 GPA then dropping out due to pregnancy and three years of 1.0 GPA then dropping out before your expulsion hearing for cheating both put "3 years of college" on your resume.

I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previous employment do the job of training / filtering who to consider, and not engage in the training part of it much any more.

Maybe it's due to the increasing cost of hiring people that you must only take a chance on a sure bet, and that there is less and less appetite (financial return-wise) to spend money on training people who are just as likely to pick up and leave for another company.

... perhaps put another way, the 'professionalization' of HR?

For various reasons, on both the employer and employee side, this has changed a lot especially when you're talking startups--but also companies like Amazon from what I understand. In any case, if the expected tenure of an employee is only a couple of years, it's probably unreasonable in most cases to have a 6-12 month training period during which the employee isn't especially productive.

That’s close to actual job requirements in a lot of places.

It’s similar to closing a house sale. The money earned by brokers who get the buyer to sign the contract is exponentially more than the money earned by the brokers who only get 90% of the way there.

That doesn’t mean that the value of the initial 90% of the work is 0.

Of course, this is an extreme example for illustration purposes, because real estate is a step function where the returns go from 0 to 100 at a single point.

The exponentially higher earnings of grads can similarly be explained as a step function where earnings go from 50 to 100 after a certain event. And it’s not even that surprising, because the event in question is completing the thing that you actually stepped out to do.

I think that ties in to the proliferation of higher degrees, where college is not a strong enough signal so students go on to receive higher degrees that signal more time, money and investment has been spent

As a restrospective thought experiment, if you offered me that piece of paper in exchange for a student loan the size of my college education, I would turn it down. But if you offered me the 4-year experience I actually got for that same loan, without the brand name, I would take it in a heartbeat. (You can't actually separate the two since the brand name in part enables the college to implement the product.)

Aside from actual academic knowledge like practice with low level OS and network concepts, here's what I got from those four years that I think made a concrete difference in my life and career:

1. The personal mentorship I got from a professor, who I met during a summer internship, but he was from my comp sci department. It was serendipitous that the two circles collided, but it was crucial, and, to the point, it was enabled by the college network.

2. Meeting people through friends in college who would become co-founders or connections into other jobs.

3. Taking very specific classes on soft skills, such as writing workshops. One in particular, which I took early in college, was like getting two in depth code reviews a week for twelve weeks, except it was for my writing. That course made me fluid and precise at writing. I still suck in comparison to many of my former classmates who write professionally, but it made me a stand-out effective communicator in engineering. In retrospect I would have paid 1/4th of a semester's tuition in a heartbeat for that course (took 4 courses that semester).

4. Being surrounded by people who weren't engineers, who were formidable doers and thinkers, about other fields, such as global health policy and politics. I still remember getting my ass handed to me in a dinnertime debate by someone who was obviously more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about public policy than I was. Getting intellectually smacked down by friends regularly taught me humility and appreciation for the value of expertise in other fields.

5. Spending four years in the company of driven people with high standards. For the people who embrace it, it rubs off on you the same way working on a strong team does. It demystifies high performers and teaches you that you can turn yourself into one.

6. Due to spending time around people who had money/power, you learn to not be (as) intimidated by those people. It's a crash course in walking and talking like an "elite" whether or not you are one.

And, well, the fact that it is isn't ranked well on any of those international rankings has not been a problem for my carrier at all. I have rarely been asked where I went to university and I don't think that it's affected my carrier at all.

However the fact that I have no student debt because tuition was pretty much free has been a boon for my professional life.

But I agree with you; I've worked in a lot of places, and in all of those except France, once you have real work experience, your university degree doesn't mean a whole lot for normal engineering jobs.

In the end, I do think that degrees matter less than what people think and that it's completely possible to have a good career without the school name or university name having much of an influence (obviously it's anecdotical and probably depends on the field). I do strongly believe that being saddled with lifelong student loans is probably more detrimental than the positive aspects of a degree in most cases (maybe with the exception of lawyers but the only those who can cope with the lifestyle)

As an example, in a previous job, I noted that the new French software engineer had come from INRIA and was a graduate of a Grand ecole. The fact that this resource went on to demonstrate well above average work and domain abilities was not a surprise to me.

So note that some of us do pay attention even if it is not mentioned during recruitment.

But if you're not going for that threshold, you'll likely not run into issues. And if you're in niche-careers, it's probably true as well.

We don't have great alternative mechanisms to find employable people otherwise, and given the current unpopularity of standardized tests / uniform measures of performance or skill, what can an employer do?

There’s a wide variety of viewpoints on HN, so I think it’s unnecessary to speculate on what other people think, but personally the thing that doesn’t sit that well for me is that you’ve stated an opinion with nothing at all to back it up.

FWIW, having gone to both a not super reputable college (state school), and also a very reputable one, I can’t say that reputation is the “main” value, I might have benefitted from it but I wouldn’t even know. The math classes at the reputable school had much higher standards, they were harder and I learned more. I have some lifelong friends from both schools, but the group from the reputable school is generally much higher profile and further reach. I sold a business to someone I met through the reputable school. I also now work for someone I met through the state school.

That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program.

It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.

I guess maybe i needed to do my studies under one set of assumptions to have the motivation. Whilst only finding out on the otherside that those years were really only spent to get me my first job. And now my degree doesn't matter.

True passion for the job will carry you much further than a piece of paper from a uni.

After 15 years, most people do not care anymore about your education; but when getting that first job, unless you have an impressive portfolio (and even then...), that piece of paper is huge.

With a recognised piece of paper, you can get much more easily get into a recognised company, which has a trickle down effect for the rest of your career.

There are some areas like doctor or experimental physics where physical presence makes a lot of sense. But most education can be found and consumed much better by thinking of the internet as your entire college and then work much more on self-motivation and curiosity which are the real secrets to educating yourself.

At what point will firms rank new grad candidates inversely proportional to the prestige of their university?

Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates. Many positions probably don't demand skills beyond the ability to write mostly CRUD apps. The pedigree doesn't really matter in that case.

All companies have these roles. Somebody needs to do the mundane work.

Never.

> Prestigious universities equate with more expensive candidates.

But that doesn't mean you rank those people lower. It means you offer them the job at the budgeted salary. If they don't accept the job offer at the salary range you've budgeted for the position, then you move on to the next candidate.

This might make less sense if there's a strong opportunity cost (i.e., missing a candidate because they already accepted a job), but that's not typically the case for new grads.

There's a reason why ivy league college newspapers are far more impactful than at lower tier schools.

Administrators for the sake of administrators everywhere.

All the while these organisations are grading their own students we will continue to get a somewhat mediocre system.

When I started university I was a returning student with a budding tech career. I promised myself I would get a degree, but I wasn't totally sure what benefit it would be. I thought I already had the tech skills needed to do what I wanted to do.

While taking some required political science classes I discovered the world of development cooperation. I did a bit of traveling. I decided to use my time at a 4-year to explore the world of NGOs and other large-scale initiatives. I did a study-abroad project to do some free tech work for a global nonprofit. I fell in love with a new city. I did a short masters to further my knowledge, and also see if it would be possible to combine my tech background and this new world. It was, so I did.

It's hard to know if something similar would have happened without that experience. It's hard to put a dollar amount on it, since I a) paid for my own education and b) probably earn less now that I've changed directions than I would if I hadn't. But I'm so incredibly glad I did. I also don't know how to compare this story to the many stories of people who graduate with 80k in debt and can't find a job in field in which they studied.

I have a friend going through this scenario minus the 80k debt. The field might not exist in their location. She’s looking at relocating and losing custody of her daughter. Or working another job and staying put for her family. I’ve met a lot of brilliant people who’s ambition has been bypassed or delayed due to external factors.

Sometimes getting the brass ring means sacrificing more than you can give.

There's a lot more to life than credentializing for wage slavery.

Doing the same over $ONLINE_SERVICE is not quite the same experience, just like a terminal-emulator-in-a-browser isn't quite the real thing when you have slightly higher and jittery lag. And an async/await model (post code on forum, get back answer anything from minutes to hours later) is not the same thing at all.

For some students, they can only receive advice asynchronously and it makes it difficult to meet deadlines based on EDT timezones. Even video debugging/office hours for people in EDT is awful, despite advances in screen sharing/Zoom.

Also, I helped transition a professor to virtual instruction. They had never installed the Internet in their house before. They own no smartphone. They communicate entirely through landline and a dated desktop PC in their office. When absolutely necessary (course admin, journal paper updates) they will use Pine for email. This prof taught a 30-person graduate course in neurobiology having never touched any of the technologies they had to use. Bless that class.

A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.

Say you pay someone to do an inspection of your home that the gov is requiring before you can sell. Has that inspector taught you anything or made any tangible improvements to your home? No. What they've done is signal to the gov and buyers that your home passes inspections.

Colleges even market this aspect as the key differentiator from online classes.

In that case, I do think some refund is due on principle, because students at home in isolation definitely aren't getting that.

    - less anxiety being in IRC than in class
    - more focused (less distracted by people inviting you, peer pressure)
    - more communication with other students and teachers
    - automatic grading systems being very exciting to keep improving solutions rapidly

-I have no idea why anyone would have anxiety about being in class, I don't think that's a common problem.

-There's less focus in online classes because now you have to manage all the different ways you have to communicate with everyone, official and unofficial, in the hopes you can get enough interaction to slog your way through the horribly written assignments and figure out what they actually want you to do.

-There's essentially zero communication with teachers -- they're almost totally absent, communication with other students can be helpful, or not, and you don't always know. There are typically two or three TAs for up to 600 students, so any kind of focused interaction with a TA is almost unheard of, and even if you do get that their level of expertise is often in question.

-autograders work well for some very defined sorts of problems, but they don't work at all for most workflows. The TAs, in my experience, spend most of their limited time fixing autograder screwups.

Like 1 in 5 college students[1], I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. I frequently have anxiety in class, especially before the professor starts talking and is just scanning the room and occasionally making eye contact with me, or if I'm asked to interact with other students.

That said, I still think that MOOCs aren't remotely comparable to real college classes.

[1] pg. 16 - https://www.acha.org/documents/ncha/NCHA-II_Spring_2018_Refe...

- I'd much rather be in-person, where I can better gauge what others are communicating and more readily have two-way communication about the material.

- I'm way less focused when on my own computer, on my own time.

- I find I communicate way less purely online than I would in-person.

- Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming, as it can only really test inputs and outputs, and misses a ton of nuance. I want to also know if my code sucks, regardless of it producing the correct output or not.

Discussion boards are mostly a tire fire; they're mostly useful for dealing with platform problems. They can probably be better when you restrict access to a qualified class but they don't really scale.

>Automatic grading sucks, especially for programming

I'd probably say automatic grading sucks, "even for programming." At least automatic grading can evaluate outputs of non-trivial programs. Programming is one of the few areas where autograding works for non-trivial, not multiple choice, questions.

Maybe even this is not that hard. People already compete virtually on mobile and console games of all kinds of complexity just to see their names at the top of a "leaderboard"

If you can tell from a resume someone attended in-person, it gives their degree more academic integrity. Not that you can't cheat if you attend in-person, but it's a whole lot harder to pay someone to take the exam for you.

Ivy league and other high end colleges are much more a brand than they are a product.

The what?