På Overcoming Bias fortæller Robin Hanson at studenter i højere grad går på universitet for at få papirerne på, at de har været der, end at de faktisk lærer noget.

Eksemplet er, at da han arbejde på et NASA laboratorium i nærheden af Stanford, da t…

Th Microsoft, Novell, and Cisco certifications are in a senses the ultimate in credentialism. If you have the right industry credentials you can get hired much more easily than you can without them. An MCSE is worth maybe $100K – maybe more.

At first I was a bit uneasy teaching these classes because I had in fact never taken a Microsoft technical class myself. Later I discovered that none of the faculty had ever taken a course. Like me they had just read the books and taken the tests. What was more shocking was the realization that none of the hundreds of students who had attended these classes focused on preparing the student for these specific exams had ever passed even one. Let me repeat – the teachers had passed lots of exams but none had never taken a class. Hundreds of students took dozens of classes but none had ever managed to pass a single official Microsoft test.

There was, at least at that time, a perfect correlation.

The students were by no means unsatistfied. The classes were always over booked. We always turned away potential class members. The teachers also didn’t seem to mind that none of their students actually succeeded.

I would have been much better off if I had an MD rather than a PhD in Physics. Because life with a very ill daughter is hell and plain sad. What makes it worse is that her brother – who we adopted just last year – shows initial signs of developing a life-long version of the same illness but in a chronic form.

To get formally admitted to a medical school, I have to give up tenure and study two years of pre-med, ace the MCAT etc etc…. too many hassles and too long a process especially for someone who was born in 1960.

I thought of just sitting in for classes at medical schools. But they won’t let me attend the labs, dissect human beings, etc.

I don’t know why I am writing this, but if any of you have any ideas, please post or email my anti-spam address xh8061mg4heeml8@jetable.net. Thanx!

One invests resources at time T in school in order that one is forced, on pain of losing the investment that one is making in a credential, to actually crack the math book at T+n. (Sure, that means considering sunk costs, but really, don’t we all?) And part of what one buys with the initial investment is access to teachers and such that lower the cost — even if only marginally — of cracking the math book, e.g. because they can answer a question. Part of the problem then takes the structure outlined in one of the papers Robin linked here.

I was reminded of this during this past summer when in the course of revising a paper I had to deal with a relatively elementary concept in calculus that was being referred to in various ways in various papers by mathematical economists. There was a division over exactly how this idea fit in, and I found myself trying to track down a full explanation of it and exactly what it implied and did not imply and when it held and when it did not. I ended up talking to several mathematicians and mathematical economists and going through a ridiculously large number of math textbooks of various levels and more advanced monographs before finally someone pulled out one moderately advanced textbook that finally laid it out. Otherwise there would simply be vague assertions without references or proofs of this or that.

So, there is a certain argument for having some guidance about what to read next if one is moving up a ladder in terms of sophistication and difficulty in an effort to learn math on one’s own.

I think we don’t even need the professor references.
http://www.teach12.com/teach12.asp?ai=16281
There is clearly a market for the university type experience.

Now…as an education guy…the question comes to mind why do we need the whole university thing anyhow?
In person classes, as compared to videos by expert teachers give you what?

1. A schedule…external motivation to continue in the face of human laziness or busy-ness.
2. Realtime assistance with exercises (big in my field of IT. also big when I was teaching math)
3. Question answering in realtime.
4. Audience customization

5. Lower quality lecture _almost_ all the time.

On your 2nd point. grading and evaluation. I have been convinced for years that the business of evaluation of learning and the business of teaching should be firmly separated from one another. This is true most of the time in the corporate IT training market, and seems to make a notable difference in student approach, and thus student learning. Even more remarkable is the difference between classes where a certification is pursued and one where one is not in the IT world.

A simple explanation is that this is not true, that people claim to study other topics, but they don’t learn them, either. It is easier to see if someone has actually learned the math, so there is little incentive to claim to study it.