The math is wrong and ultimately not even related to the point. Why include it? I would've preferred a post consisted of the 3rd and 2nd to last paragraphs.
No kidding. Trying to compute the odds that a particular hour of your life was spent in the "best" possible way is a recipe for misery, even when it's not an actual symptom of mental illness.
A good education is a more personal and independent experience than the article seems to imply. Rarely are the words or presentation of lectures the most valuable thing a school produces; most importantly, education often involves joining a learning community (or synthesizing one's own). This is not trivial: examples on the internet so far produced remain unusual. The video lecture is usually quite awkward: I hazard that it will always remain a limited form, unable to really support much attention or community.
I think you are totally right given the current state of video lectures--they are like the first movies, just awkward translations of stage plays that don't take advantage of the ways that a film can be different and better. I'd much rather see a lecture in person today, all else equal. But I imagine as innovators take advantage of the digital media, we'll see some pretty cool stuff one day: higher production values, Second Life-style virtual worlds, more interactivity, HD, and Discovery Channel-type content that can better compete with live lectures. Right now, though, we are definitely on that second Innovator's Dilemma line where digital lectures only compete with the low end and non-consumption, the way maybe NAND memory used to.
Also, I agree that community is a big deal, and the number one thing we are missing to really take advantage of all the cool content that is coming out. (But I do think other video-based works, like Lost or Serenity or Star Trek, have been able to support both attention and community.)
His logic is that because your college isn't the best for you at each individual class, it isn't the best for you overall. That's stupid. One must be. If there are 2,000 colleges and you chose one at random, you'd have a 1/2,000 chance of having chosen the best. Not (1/1000)^35 or whatever that moron came up with.
Not to mention it's most likely that the top x are all so close to the best for an individual, if such a thing could truly be quantified, that the difference between them is negligible. Let's say that the top 5% are that way, you now have a 5% chance, given random selection. Add in the fact that people don't attend random colleges, and there's a pretty non-zero chance that you're attending the college you should. Most people probably fail, but even then not be enough that it would have been worth the massive effort required.
I'm guessing from his abominable logic that this guy went to the wrong college.
Thanks for pointing that out to me, I should have been clearer in my analysis. I've added an update to the bottom, and hopefully that helps: "...also please note that I am talking about the best possible education relative to what could be if you were somehow able to take a series of the best classes offered anywhere. I am sure your education was just great in some absolute sense…just like the Red Sox are pretty good at baseball, even if the All-Star team might be better."
Maybe a web analogy will work better. There is one blog (or group of blogs) today that's the most informative for you. It's a great blog, it's updated frequently, and you like it a lot. Which blogs you read is not random--you've checked out a lot of them, and you know what you like. But what if we could create some sort of blog aggregator that posted links to the best posts of the best blogs? That could be a cool thing, right?
Also it depends on how you look at it. By some metrics of "best" there are clear leaders. For instance, if your goal in college is to land a job running a hedge fund afterwards, it's pretty clear you should get a Harvard MBA. The title and connections you get from there are far more important than any classes.
Agreed. For good or ill, much of the (monetary) value of education is from what others think of it. You are totally right that if someone has a specific job like that mind, where the education is more a filtering and networking service than anything else, those odds (if you can really calculate them anymore, it's almost just pure recruiting stats at that point) get cut way down.
For those coveted private equity/VC/hedge fund jobs, if you can get in to the Harvard MBA program, you are probably getting pretty close to certain that HBS is the single best school for that (Stanford/Wharton may disagree), all else equal. The individual professors, classes, your learning style, what you actually learn, and any other individual preferences, almost wash away as non-factors in light of the credential. Good point. We may have to distinguish between an education and a degree though?
I probably should have been clearer on that as well--I was just narrowly focusing on the actual knowledge-gaining/learning aspect of education. Worth noting the other side though as we abstract away from pure learning.
