I don't generally feel like SN needs my help to stir up anti-woke sentiment, but this article is good, and Caplan is, I think, eminently reasonable, even though I disagree with him about a lot of stuff. This article amounts to a really nice and worrying summary about the state of affairs in major-ish American universities.
37 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 4 Mar
I think the higher-ed bubble is deflating and stuff like this is helping it hit bottom.
It is sad to see good programs become collateral damage, though.
reply
135 sats \ 4 replies \ @Signal312 5 Mar
Glad to see the higher education bubble deflating.
Maybe this is a good time to revisit this old post of mine "Alternatives to College/University": #404270
reply
27 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 5 Mar
Agree that that was a great post -- thanks for re-surfacing it, I think it adds a lot of value to SN when people do that strategically.
reply
27 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined 5 Mar
That was a great post. Apparently, I had started writing a comment on it, but didn't finish.
I already thought college was going to decline as an institution, but now with AI writing everyone's papers there's almost no signal value left.
reply
27 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 5 Mar
I think the value of a university education will be with us in twenty years; and it could even be higher. But it will be the result of a fundamental pivot in what it attempts to do, and the signaling value of what it means to 'graduate' from such an institution.
Broadly, I think most of the upside will come from the world being very explicit about what universities do now, and how they do it. In this, as in much else, reform won't be possible until people first admit the truth.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 5 Mar
While I do expect universities to continue existing, I think the diploma mill aspect is on the way out. What's the point when it's so easy to cheat your way through?
I expect we'll see much smaller numbers of people going to college 20 years from now and far fewer employers requiring it. The model itself will have to become more intimate, so that professors can really assess each student's competence.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ursuscamp 4 Mar
GMU used to be pretty based. I wonder what happened
reply