In most of the world the past decades there has been no thought behind who should get university education. It has been given that after high school you should aim for university. I have studied software engineering in the most prestigious university in my country and from 100+ students in my group there were only a few (myself excluded) who actually had some interest in academic work and desire to pursue it. Most of us were just coasting - passing exams and writing mediocre papers without any goal to have those papers ever being read by someone after the graduation.
I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.
OTOH, weakening the ties between the industry and science can harm both of them. Right now in the university people get a rough idea of how science works, and most of them then go to work in the industry, which sounds like a right proportion. Nobody is reading papers below PhD level anyway, so I don't think that it's undergrad papers that are a problem
If you look at the beginning of XX century, university education was much less accessible with much fewer participants, and the results were much more impressive than today across all disciplines
There was also a lot of relatively low-hanging fruit in most fields, because we basically didn't have the technology before, or simply didn't bother to look.
There's a ton of low hanging fruit now - more than ever. Every question answered raises multiple new questions. If there is a lack of opportunity to answer interesting questions, it is certainly not because the questions aren't there.
But someone needed to realise it's a low-hanging fruit in the first place. By the end of the XIX century the general agreement was that physics was pretty much done, we are now just polishing the details.
Instead of 1 reviewer, have 10; also, don't we benefit as a society when everyone is more highly educated? Sure, we have a ways to go before we get there, namely with regards to resistance to disinformation training and including more resistance to populism / fascism in the curriculum so that we have a chance to build better and more equal societies.
I dunno, I think society is best served by educating as many people as possible. I would much rather live in a world where anyone who wants a quality education can get one.
We should teach people what we expect will be relevant in their lives, which includes basic math, science, government, history, and other subjects. Although some kids still won't learn, we should try. Anyone interested in a particular subject should be able to explore it further, since interest makes it relevant to them. And we should also give people mandatory but brief exposure to many difference fields, in case they become interested.
But at a certain point, you're wasting time and effort trying (and failing) to teach students what they're unlikely to, and ultimately won't, use afterward. "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink." Meanwhile, as GP noted, students who are interested in a "quality education" can't get one, because the quality is diminished by number of students, many who aren't interested. In order to provide the best education to the most people, we must optimize; cutting people who aren't learning means we can better educate those who are.
The key is to focus education on actual skill learning, rather than just focussing on exam preparation which is typically learning specific "magic" words and phrases (e.g. "condensation", "the powerhouse of the cell").
Learning specific physics formulas has its place, but learning the principles behind the formulas is far more valuable, though harder to measure.
If there is anything good I hope we can get from AI transformation it's making our approach to education less utilitarian. We should educate ourselves because it's good to be educated, and because it's good to be around educated people, not because education gets you a good job or makes you are more valuable unit in the economy
Or AI will double down in the Dunning Krueger effect, where true mastery not only diminishes, but people collectively take low erfort AI answers as the baseline truth.
Agree - but in the US so much more could and should be done at the primary and secondary level before we even talk about the tertiary one. It's actually pretty good compared to other developed countries but a lot could be gotten out of more investment there.
I'm not convinced that will really happen. "AI" just doesn't give reliable output, and even if humans don't either, they are still far less prone to error. And errors matter, a lot.
Indeed. Also the usual criticism about education not being adequate training for the workforce bla bla is simply because education is not to train a worker in the first place. There's no way to train someone other than to let them do the damn job. Yes teaching mathematics and reading and writing is probably a prerequisite but how is Shakespeare relevant? It's just a confusion of two things: learning for the sake of learning, and learning for the sake of employability.
I'm not arguing for one or the other. I'm just saying that I would also hate it if university CS for example just became a web bootcamp to churn out as many code monkeys as fast as possible. There is a place for just vocational training, and there is another place for a more platonic kind of learning, and just sending everyone off to university and tying employability to a degree is really stupid.
Alas it can't be fixed now, because 1. For profit universities 2. HR needing a quick filter 3. States needing to standardize some kind of path for kids
looks like history runs in cycles ... Knowledge was strictly guarded and the powers that be used to decide who gets an education. Looks like you are espousing the same, discounting all the good that has come about because of open education.
I feel that you didn't read my comment carefully enough (although I could have been more clear). To me university was really good and eye-opening but looking back, I had no place in academia. A good college would have been better. Consuming knowledge and creating knowledge are in somewhat different categories and most people are consumers.
I don't think it is true either, considering the broad claims made.
The thing to be changed is research incentives, not getting the bar even higher. Take the Francesca Gino case, for example. I don't think anyone can argue that Harvard's bar is "not high enough".
I didn't read it as simply making the bar higher for entering universities. For example here in Germany there are Universitäten (Universities) and Fachhochsculen (sort of like vocational academies, but they still award bachlor and master degrees).
Most people who studied computer science with me at university weren't interested in computer science at all but just wanted a good vocational training for entering the lucrative carrer of "software developer". I think it would benefit both them and employers if they would have instead attended a good vocational school for software development.
I didn't mean that at all. I am a regular developer who got into this field at a lucky time and am as worried about the future employment prospects as many are.
Either the institution develops and teaches methods and traditions that are beneficial for people in general, in which case it ought to be a good idea to offer them broadly, or it is used for gatekeeping and stratifying, in which case I think it should be abolished.
I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.