[ExI] big rip in education

[William Flynn Wallace]

 Anyone anywhere on the planet can get an excellent technical education, at
home.

spike


My point of view:  do you remember (maybe I am too old) those report cards
we got in grammar school, where the teacher made some remarks about our
in-class behavior or study habits?  I wonder if that still goes on.  POint
is:  at every level we need reports of what a person can and cannot do, and
that requires better and better psychological tests (which go far beyond
the typical person's thinking about tests, which is to say that they assume
that clinical things are being measured.


What do we see coming out of college?  Degrees a person has.  That's it.
No measure of competence in dealing with others.  No measure of weaknesses
and strengths in their field.  No measure of character.  Of course there
are tests that industry uses to try to measure these things.  (for Spike -
a home-schooled student has no impartial judge to rate their kids on these
things - do you think they maybe are biased?


Improvement in tests and other ratings at all levels would help every
teacher and every student, not to mention those looking to hire the
students.  At present, these tests are minimally used or even absent, and
none of them is perfect, but they do have some minimal validity or industry
would fire their industrial psychologists.


Industry still uses personal interviews, which have repeatedly been shown
to be lousy at predicting job success (Dunning-Kruger effect - bosses are
sure they can tell all sorts of things about a job candidate which studies
show that few can.)


Want to improve education?  Improve ratings and tests.  Put a psychologist
or counselor in every school whose job it is to develop ways of measuring
the students.


bill w

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 10:36 AM <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Dave Sill
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] big rip in education
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 7:13 PM Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> I’m wondering why no one here has discussion Bryan Caplan’s on education:
>
>
>
> https://press.princeton.edu/titles/11225.html
>
>
>
> >>… — why the BA and BS degrees have become the new high school diploma.
>
>
>
> >…Yep. And higher education is big money…
>
>
>
> Huge.  Like plenty of other big money endeavors, education is an impacted
> industry.  It is reacting as impacted industries do.
>
>
>
> >… Education *should* be about more than just acquiring the skills needed
> to perform a job...such as the skills needed to perform living a good life…
>
>
>
> Society is in the process of defining what education is really all about.
> If people come out of school knowing all about {insert plenty of the
> subjects where degrees are still being offered} but not having mastered
> modern skills and technologies such as how to find reliable information
> online, how to minimize taxes legally, how to invest and so on, that person
> lacks life skills and is not ready for prime time.
>
>
>
> When I was in college, we sometimes encountered liberal arts students
> (most of the campus was that.)  If (s)he and I compared our curricula, we
> might comment in unison for the first sentence “What you are getting here
> isn’t even higher education.”  Her second sentence would be “What you are
> getting here is mere job training.”  My second sentence would be similar,
> but would lack eloquence, since engineering students are not required to
> master language skills.  We only make things.  Such as… money.
>
>
>
>
>
> >…I think independent skills testing/certification is the future.  -Dave
>
>
>
> Ja, more employers are recognizing this.  They need people who can develop
> new products at minimum cost and maximum speed, with little or no need for
> the skills for which the universities are coaxing students into ruinous
> debt.  Certification is faster, it is lower cost (much lower) and it goes
> around the traditional admissions process.  It’s a big win for the usual
> losers in that process.  It levels the playing field.  Anyone anywhere on
> the planet can get an excellent technical education, at home.
>
>
>
> spike
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