Of course, it's the same guy who previously invented languages :)
Seriously though, I'd like to offer a perspective that will hopefully demonstrate that OP's opinion is not devoid of merit.
I propose that in a perfect world, degrees would not be necessary. Also, grades would not be necessary for the same reason. Putting it in rather simplistic terms, both are something artificial that degrade the passion for knowledge by mixing it with the passion for prestige. They are a crude instrument serving as an external motivator that often comes at the expense of a natural and internal one which exists in everyone. An internal motivator is much better at rendering any difficulties along the path insignificant due to the joy of the pursuit.
Of course, I don't think that abolishing grades and degrees today would be wise. It would be a disaster, as irresponsible as taking taking away very good crutches from a handicapped person. I just hope that with time, the person can be taught to be more passionate about learning to walk than improving his crutches.
I assume this is not going to be a popular opinion because many people are too deeply invested in their academic achievements. Also, I might not be seeing the whole picture so I'm open to criticism.
Yes, there's IS literally a "guy who invented college"...
"An academy is an institution of secondary education or higher learning, research, or honorary membership. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia (...) north of Athens, Greece".
This has been the early prototype for later roman, middle-ages, renaissance and finally modern colleges.
It wasn't the first teacher or even school were children were taught, but it was the first higher learning institution, with organized courses and mostly modern form.
[these academies] are to be distinguished from the Western-style university which is an autonomous organization of scholars that originated in medieval Europe and was adopted in other world regions since the onset of modern times
I only copy/pasted that part to provide the exact dates and location.
Other than that, it's neither a well written article nor very accurate. In any case, the missing part before your quoted text is not "these academies". The article talks about several "ancient higher-learning institutions were developed in many cultures to provide institutional frameworks for scholarly activities". That part of the article is quite sloppy too (mentioning "museums", "scientific institutions" in a lemma referring to antiquity [1]).
Then it goes on to refer to the Academy too, later on, but even so, it undermines its own differentiation, as the Academy was both an "Autonomous organization"(check), and of "scholars" (check).
It didn't follow the full template of how a univerity today is (that starts around the 16th century), but it was most of the way there and is widely regarded as the precursor of the modern university (even the name "academic" is not a coincidence).
Now, my intention of reffering to the Academy was to give an example that the earliest college is something that we got in historical times and we know who created it (contrary to what the parents wrote).
If, as you suggest, we maintain that the first "actual" college was created even later, that serves me even better.
[1] There were museums in antiquity, but extremely few, and of them we know nothing much, and especially not that they operated any schools.
I think that progressives (especially Chomsky) overstate the role of hard power/money in politics. Or perhaps they understate the role of soft power. E.g. the progressive movement in the West is driven by a relatively small group of academics and journalists. It is notable how many social sciences professors are self-professed Marxists. I don't see this in a conspiratorial way (as some do), of Marxists seeking to push an agenda. But rather, the core of the progressive movement are people who think that both the economic, and also the political and social realm, are characterized by power, domination and oppression. If you don't believe this about economics, it's much harder to believe this about the rest.
I don't buy it. Any academic presentation of a subject includes the limits of current knowledge. Maybe this is not emphasized enough, but it's a matter of extent, not a qualitative refusal to acknowledge ignorance.
A great example is that mainstream academic economists are very open about not being able to explain why monetary stimulus works. At one point (maybe this goes back to Keynes or even further) people attributed it to sticky prices. But current research cannot come up with a reasonable mechanism based on sticky prices that would explain the magnitude of the effect of monetary policy. Currently people accept that what we observe on the macro level cannot be explained on the micro level.
Charitably, that would read "the government already has enough information to collect payments anyway, so it might as well do this, but should let private industry do the rest". Personally I don't think this is an appropriate use of the information the government has, or the government's power. In Australia they do it this way, but the government also does the loans. However your critique lacks substance as it ignores the legitimate reasons why some tasks are more appropriate for the government, and some for private industry, and repeats the tired old "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" schtick.
There is nothing in the article that suggests that the bank would be entitled to anything but a fixed share of your income, female or otherwise. In theory [0], if women on average earned less than men because of taking time off to raise children, then they would have to pay a higher percentage of their future income for their education. But on average they would pay the same total amount (in an efficient market). I'm not sure why you think this would be unfair. This would not differ from the present market where women and men also pay equal amounts for education.
[0] Personally I don't think that selling equity in oneself would ever be possible for practical/legal reasons. As mentioned in another post, the only thing that comes close is Australia's higher education loans.
I'm just thinking about the practical aspects of such an idea. Bankers like their cash flow. Shouldn't people who work more and make more get a better deal? It's only fair!
Bankers like their cash flow, but they also have to compete with other bankers. My claim (and the claim implicit in the article) is that people will get an actuarially fair rate for their education. And given this, they will not pay back more (on average) than if they paid up front, or if they took out a loan under a competitive loan market. I don't think your parody of how bankers think makes sense. Our economic system is not perfect, but it has a certain logic to it, and refusing to engage with that and instead making up nefarious motives, is not productive.
That is pretty much it. I would guess that most people pay back their debt in the end, so it is not entirely equity-like, it is more like a mix of debt and equity (the interest rate is below market, so lower income people end up paying back less in net-present-value).
I guess this is the economically efficient solution. The main problem is that it needs to be administered by the government, for practical reasons as well as adverse selection. In Australia it also happens that the top 5 universities are of roughly equal quality, and the next 5 are not far below, so that a one-size-fits-all approach makes sense (there are no good private universities in Australia). I don't see how this system could work in the US where there is such a wide range of qualities in universities.
A key feature that seems to be missing is that the people making the decision about what course to take and even what students to send to university are still the students themselves who are notoriously bad at deciding that. With a proper equity system, the decisions would be influenced by people who are actually trying to be most efficient.
On the other hand, when you say "most efficient", I'll ask naively -- "most efficient at doing what, exactly?".
If the answer is "generating profit within the current economy" then that clearly isn't always a positive thing. In many cases there are some very negative effects.
I think there is arguably more value in having an additional well-educated poorly-paid person reflecting upon society and suggesting alternative objectives (provided that this can eventually be translated into public debate) - who perhaps never earns very much, and never pays off their student loans - than an additional highly profitable person who is (at best) making us all incrementally more efficient at doing whatever it is precisely that we're already doing (and at worst just reallocating wealth to themselves).
Generally "efficient" means maximizing social utility, which in practice for economists means GDP [0].
I agree that there are benefits to an educated population (in spite of disagreeing with the progressive bias in university education). But you are wrong that "efficiency" is meaningless or means "making us all incrementally more efficient at doing whatever it is precisely that we're already doing". Efficiency means increasing the size of the "pie" so that however we choose to divide it up, there is more pie to go around. We could divide the GDP from the year 1800 as evenly as we liked and not reach the standard of living of 2015.
[0] and no, the broken windows fallacy does not apply here, no one is trying to literally maximize GDP, but GDP represents the kind of thing that economists care about.
Both equity and debt have an element of moral hazard, and both provide some incentives to make the efficient choice about whether to get an education. A student taking on a loan for education (Australian style or otherwise) might make themselves worse off if their future income change from education is sufficiently low.
In my opinion, returns to college education are so high that the focus should be on having as many people go as possible, not on selection the efficient subset.
That's not clear at all. Education fees have gone up, but it's not clear that the cause is student loans (and the subsequent increase in demand for education), and even if they did, we would expect at least some increase in education as a result of loans that allow more people to get an education. Should people who have the cash up front be expected not to compete?
But I think the main difference is a shift in jobs where higher education becomes a requirement, and this is not just because of competition among employees, but because the supply of jobs is changing. Low skill jobs are moving offshore or taken by (sometimes illegal) immigrants who can live more cheaply. In order to obtain the (higher) standard of living of today's America, people need to create more value which requires more skills. A perfect example is the IT industry. Company's like Google create huge amounts of value[0], and employees who contribute this are rewarded.
[0] no, not selling ads, but the service that people use in exchange for the micro-payment of viewing an ad.
The fact that students, most of whom have no assets and have never worked, and cannot prove their future earning potential, can get over $100k in loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy just by signing their name, has clearly caused massive distortions in the education market.
During the past few decades, the number of administrators in American universities has grown significantly, tuition has risen dramatically, and even public universities are investing in luxury amenities to attract student money, and raising tuition to pay for them.
The past few decades have also seen a proliferation of for-profit universities which are being investigated by the government for exploiting students by encouraging them to take out huge loans to pay tuition for programs without any value. They are taking advantage of flawed student aid policy by using the students to take money from the government.
None of these things have happened in any other wealthy country, even though those countries have also seen the same shift in the job market that the United States has. This is not a consequence of the changing job market, because if it was, it would have happened elsewhere. It is a consequence of policy choices.
The incentives for bad behavior are abundantly clear. In other developed countries, it is harder to get student loans, and easier to pay them back, and college is more accessible to poor students than it is in the United States. That's because public universities in other developed countries have caps on tuition, and students have caps on how much they can borrow, so universities can't use students as a vehicle for diverting government money to themselves.
1. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses compete with each other. In this case, increasing safety standards in a uniform way, will not change profits since the costs can be passed on to consumers.
2. Profit margins are so tight because truck businesses are competing with other forms of transport. In that case, imposing more safety standards will result in less business being done by truck, and more by other means. As long as these don't have worse safety issues, this would be a good thing.
You are right the revenue is a meaningless figure in both cases.
In almost all cases knowledge of copy-on-write doesn't have to be widespread because it is equivalent to value semantics.
It is only because they were using a buggy dll (which for non-matlab users, is custom native code that matlab calls against using a FFI), that the expected semantics of matlab were violated.
Really sickening how they throw in a jibe about the lack of women, just so they can sound self righteous and distract from the immorality[0] of them trespassing on YCombinator's event.
[0] Not that it's always immoral for journalists to trespass. Clearly they play a special role in society and sometimes this might involve going to places they weren't invited. However to me this crosses the line because there is no public interest angle. Everything in the article could have been read about in (or extrapolated from) articles written by the invited journalists.
The closest I got to an on-the-record comment confirming that
press access was based on favor, not fire code, was when a YC
registration official rejected my request for a badge, for
the final time: “It’s an invite-only event for investors, and
only a few select press are invited.”
The (paywalled) article states that they attempted to get press passes but were denied, so they snuck in. Perhaps the size of the event meant that YC wanted to limit the number of press? I don't know if they have a reputation for being disruptive, I just found the whole article petty.
Trespassing is not the same as going somewhere you weren't invited. It is always wrong for journalists to trespass (i.e. on private propery), but it's not wrong for them to show up uninvited.
Curious where the line is, i.e. if Demo Days were at YC's offices (which it used to be, right?) would it be trespassing to show up uninvited? It's private property after all.
IANAL but if there's no locked doors or signs saying you aren't welcome to an apparently public place, then I don't think it's trespassing until someone asks you to leave. A shopping mall is private property too, for example.
Merely mentioning the observation is clearly an attempt to influence the reader. If I say that I notice you did not beat your wife today, then I have clearly directed the reader to an unpleasant accusation.
