And you aren't even mentioning the case of degree programs that are in some essential sense about learning to use equipment costing in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases whose availability is strictly controlled by the US government.

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).

Also, chemistry/biochemistry. How would the labs work? I mean, get real. For anything software, sure, that can be taught almost totally remotely. But most actual engineering disciplines just aren't going to have effective remote coursework with hands-on labs any time soon.

There is almost no demand for 'actual' engineering a ton of this is completely offshored into oblivion, my girlfriend has a degree in chemistry and now works in a bank. There is extremely little demand for everything outside of software.

I don't buy that in the slightest. IT is, hands-down, the most commonly outsourced. The building engineers who inspected my foundation made me wait for 3 months because of demand.

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).

Bloom's two-sigma problem is only tangentially related to your argument. What Bloom found was that one-on-one instruction using a very specific type of teaching (Direct Instruction) coupled with mastery-based learning, results in some pretty spectacular gains (at least according to a few, rather underpowered studies).

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.

I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think it strongly argues for university being highly inefficient compared to optimal education strategies. University cohorts should probably be smaller, with smaller class sizes and more stringent entry requirements to work toward the ideal 1:1 student:teacher ratios. Sure it’s more expensive, but if you get 2 std deviations out of it, that’s huge.

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.

You are absolutely correct, which is why I keep harping on the Bloom 2 sigma problem. Its an easy way to highlight to readers how significant human 1 on 1 mentoring is to academic outcomes.

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.

> ...now we need the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, a mentor that customizes information that matches a student.

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

This can’t happen (in the United States) until there are alternate ways of making a decent living for normal people who can’t self-teach math and programming skills. College is a mandatory job “certification” for a lot of office and other types of jobs so college has to be approachable enough that almost anyone can be accepted.