Comment by ChadNauseam
10 months ago
If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas.
Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), because I actually want to learn.
There are many college students for whom none of these tests would pass. They would not attend if there was no diploma, they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class.
What made us think these students were ever interested in learning in the first place? Instead, it seems more likely that they just want a degree because they believe that a degree will give them an advantage in the job market. Many people will never use the information that they supposedly learn in college, and they're aware of this when they enroll.
Personally, the fact that they can now get a degree with even less wasted effort than before doesn't bother me one bit. People who want to learn still have every opportunity to.
Students want the diploma because it has value. It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.
Further, if a student can get a diploma without work, then the diploma does not have value anymore. If diplomas are no longer valuable, the signal they provide in the labor market will turn into noise.
If employers no longer look for the diploma-signal in an employee, what will be the reason an employer will hire an employee?
I think this story will become true, and society will radically shift into one where critical thinking skills will actually be the only skills employers look for in employees, since the grunt work can be automated.
What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
In a medieval guild, to be admitted as a master, an apprentice had to create a chef d'oevre, or masterpiece, so called for this reason.
In the computer engineering industry, you increasingly have to demonstrate the same: either as a part of your prior work for hire, or a side project, or a contribution to something open-source.
A diploma is still a useful signal, but not sufficient, except maybe for very junior positions straight from college. These are exactly the positions most under pressure by the automation.
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Honestly, a future where diplomas are just noise and employers stop caring about them and thus young people stop wasting years of their lives "learning" something they don't care about sounds like a huge improvement.
LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.
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What becomes the signal then? Will we shift back into apprenticeship based employment? How do potential laborers display their critical thinking skills apart from displaying them in person?
This is already true to some extend. Not apprenticeship taking place of college, but the last couple of places I worked hiring generally happened based on: I already know this person from open source projects/working with them in a company/etc.
In certain companies, degrees were already unimportant even before LLMs because they generally do not provide a very good signal.
I might be a good thing. Colleges have become complacent and too expensive. Costs of an education have been increasing while employment opportunities decreasing for some degree categories. People have been sounding alarms for a while and colleges have not been listening. The student loan market is booming.
Now if students can shortcut the education process, they can spend less time in it and this may force colleges to reinvent themselves and actually rethink what education looks like in the new era.
Why wouldn't the shift to be to raise the standards of the schools?
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I was somewhat downvoted for saying something similar recently here [1].
Four year degree is a very expensive investment in the current environment. We should push younger people to face the real world as soon as possible. Apprenticeship is indeed a great way to achieve that IMO. As a great side effect the young people won’t have to start out their careers saddled with huge debt.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43768903
> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.
Amen.
I look forward to the era where we train professionals the old fashion way: apprenticeships. It sure worked for blacksmiths and artisans for hundreds of years.
That is how many professionals are training in many European countries, and they still want a diploma to go with it.
In many countries, regardless of how learning it was achieved, you still need a paper to prove that you actually did it.
And in countries like Germany, better keep all those job evaluations close at heart because they get asked for as part of many job interview processes, additionally have them reviewed by lawyers, as they legally can't say anything negative, there is an hidden language on how to express negativity which to the reader sound positive on first read.
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PhDs are apprenticeships. Students perform original research under the supervision of a doctoral advisor, and submit their work to a "guild" of external reviewers (peer reviewed journals or conferences). Once the student has three peer-reviewed publications, they graduate.
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An apprentice, after five years of work, can be a master, just by practcising.
That's why the universities of Oxford and Cambridge give Master's degree to everyone that gets a Bachelor's degree after five years, without further examination or coursework (note that these are MAs only, not MRes, MPhil or MBA degrees, which typically require 1-2 years of studies, exams and theses).
Historically, the academic Master was seen as equivalent to a Master in a craft (e.g. philosophy <=> carpentry).
Companies don't want to retain anyone longer than 2 years. They would never go for this unless forced to. By collective action.
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Teenagers and children were treated as a free servant for several years, and probably cannot learn anything.
Soon?
I hire people now and where they went to school means little to me. The first priority is “can they do the work?” which is a niche programming. After that is established, I barely take note of school.
I don’t personally count a CS degree as an indication the person is a good programmer, or thinks logically, or has good work ethic.
Problem is you most likely don’t have that big operation.
For company I work for we hire 1 dev per year and I believe last year we did not even hire a single person.
So I do have time to check up the candidate do 3 rounds each 1 hr so that candidates can see what company are we and what person is the candidate. We also are small company so we don’t get that many applicants anyway.
I cannot imagine how it goes when someone needs to hire 20 devs in one quarter. Especially for a company that is any way known and they can get 1000CVs for a single position. They need to filter somehow.
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HR seems a lot like real estate appraisal as~in appraisers know nothing about construction.
One could in theory establish the value of a thing or person by comparing it with similar things but if everyone does that the process becomes senseless.
If a working car is worth 5000, the same car from the same year with a defect that costs 1000 to fix should be worth 4000. If the repair costs 6000 there is no car.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No, it has value because it gatekeeps class mobility. Degrees haven't signified learning or problem solving longer than I've been alive. The attitude is that if you pay for an education, you're entitled to a degree. The education aspect is optional.
> If students find a way to get a diploma without doing the work, it will soon be worth less than the paper on which it is printed.
I think this is already the case.
> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No. It has value, because companies value it. It sets the starting point for your first salary and then for every salary negotiation moving forward.
As someone who did not go to university, but has the same knowledge self-taught I can tell you that this piece of paper would have opened so many doors and made life so much easier. It took me 15 years to get a salary, that people get with the piece of paper after graduating. And not because it took me 15 years to reach that level of knowledge. I had that by the time the other graduated.
I had a friend who always cheated in school, and now he works for a big car company and earned a fuck ton of money.
Life is unfair and companies only care about the paper your diploma is printed on. If students would ask me for advice, I would tell them to cheat whenever possible.
You forgot one big reward with your approach. You are not 200k in debt which will take that kid with diploma to get that piece of paper. You are debt free.
I am not arguing on the merit of having a diploma is a bad thing - the colleges these days have turned their backs on the people as well.
Average $100k to get a piece of paper (LLMs are not the issue here the useless degrees that the colleges offer). Invest that $100k at an average 15% return - it becomes a lot of money 25 years from now.
Or get a piece of paper (if your major is useless) and pay the banks 100k + interest.
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And companies value it because it signals that the holder of that paper can do the work and isn’t completely stupid.
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> It has value because a student can only get it by learning and problem-solving.
No. That's how it should be, but the reality looks different: it has value because it shows that someone spent 3+ years doing what they were told to do, enduring all the absurdities they were subjected to in the meantime. Whatever means they used to cheat don't matter, since they still worked on what someone told them to and produced results satisfying the expectations.
There are, perhaps, institutions where learning and problem-solving are seen as the most important while "following orders" and "staying in line" are deemphasized. For the students of all the others, putting up with an utterly absurd environment is often one of the biggest barriers to learning. Yet, it's a requirement without fulfilling which you can forget about graduating. Hence my conclusion: the diploma from most learning institutions certifies you as a good corporate drone - and that's enough of a signal in many situations, so why bother trying to fix it?
This is a very bold statement, you should consider substantiating it at least a little, maybe give just one example on what those absurdities collee students have to endure are, that prove they're good corporate drones?
From what I remember it was 4 years of learning stuff I signed up to learn, occasionally being quizzed on said stuff, and then they gave me a paper that claims I know the stuff.
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And that won't be their problem, they'll be long gone having achieved what they wanted when they were cheating. It is a societal problem or institutional and industry problem. If the market and these universities want these degrees to mean anything as signaling mechanism they must stop these students from cheating some way somehow...the students are never going to stop themselves.
But it will always be worth more than not having it, so companies will still require it.
Good. It's about time.
You can also get it by cheating and bribing.
Consider that there is some in-between.
Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.
I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.
There is no in-between here. Consider:
The course I'm interested in gets kinda hard, and my "just pull up an LLM" muscle is very, very strong, (and besides, I'm not used to struggling! and why should I get used to it in the classes i like?! I can't afford a C in my major!) so ... I use LLMs on my "I'm interested in it" class too and... we're back to the original argument.
Most people don't go to college to learn for the sake of learning – that would be a very expensive luxury. They go for the opportunities that it opens up. The learning itself helps with that, but so does being able to prove that they've learned it. That what the diploma is meant to be for.
That's a US-centric view. A huge number of people in the world have access to high level education free of charge.
Opportunity cost is cost.
I'm not American. I said most people, and most people in the world don't have free university education.
Yes, but piano lessons are not a music degree. Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either.
I find a lot of these comments more disturbing than the concerns about AI.
> Similarly, vocational programs or apprenticeships are not a formal education either.
They are in some countries, you get at the vocational programs or apprenticeships alongside the highschool, and in the end you might get the opportunity to apply to the university or just carry on with your job.
That is how I did mine in the 1990's Portuguese education system, and how I was already coding and understanding the big boys computer world at 16y.
But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.
I won't say there are exactly zero self-taught professionals in classical music because I don't know for sure. But I will say I've never heard of one. If they exist at all they're exceptionally rare.
The music industry is built on the back of people with music degrees. They don't get the name recognition of headliners. But song writers, arrangers, and session musicians are all very likely to have formal training in theory and maybe performance.
Producers and engineers less so. Those are more of a track record who-you've-worked-with occupation.
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Not only is that not true at all. There are many other jobs you can land other than performing with a formal music degree. Of course with the right experience you might get away with not getting that formal education but you open so many doors by going through school and getting the "useless" piece of paper.
Case in point: Rachel “Raygun” Gunn. She had all the credentials in the world but single-handedly became the reason break dancing is no longer in the Olympics.
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I don't think that's a good comparison. I went college to learn and was also relieved occasionally when professors canceled class and still had to force myself to study. I'm sure plenty of your piano teachers students don't enjoy practicing the same notes over and over but do so because they want to know how to play piano.
Absolutely. Also, the level of cheating in college, even pre-AI is often overlooked in these articles.
For the exact reasons you state, pre-AI homework was often copied and then individuals just crammed for the tests.
AI is not the problem for these students, it's that many students are only in it for the diploma.
If it wasn't AI it would just be copying the assignment from a classmate or previous grad.
And I imagine the students who really want to learn are still learning because they didn't cheat then, and they aren't letting AI do the thinking for them now.
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.
In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.
There are jobs that turns you down if you don't have that diploma. No amount of real world experience will get you past that bar. If it's not there, they wont even look at the rest of your application.
Sure, if we can agree that there exist courses for which we can agree that using an LLM to pass is a reasonable thing to do, would we also not agree that the course should be nuked from orbit?
I think several orthogonal concepts are touched in this.
1. Students given bad incentives to be thrown into a system with a completely different purpose than their main goal. Then those jobs turning face to suddenly say "schools teach you nothing" and even refuse to hire the newest generation.
2. Students in general not being stimulated by primary school and given direction and vision on what to do in life. Simply being pushed by parents to "be successful".
3. The crippling reality as of late that a job doesn't even guarantee keeling a roof over your head anymore. Leading to discouragement to even bother trying.
4. Connected to #2, the decline of various apprenticeships, internships (which are now a college recruiting pipeline), and other ways to invest in employees. Even if they complain about new grad output, they are still content outsourcing such training instead of investing in their employees for a career.
There's a lot of systems failing which can arguably cause an entire collapse in the country. Then no one will get an opportunity to properly learn.
> students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas.
You have this option with things like mits open courseware. Some colleges are OK with you just wanting to learn
This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s)
Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
It's worth noting, plenty of universities do this. You can get a degree "in piano".
You can get a BMus in Piano Performance, which is a standard music degree with a piano performance specialisation. It's not a special thing of its own kind, and it's normal for performers in music college to specialise in one instrument, usually with a second as an elective.
Being able to play moderately hard pieces from dots and sight-reading are the entry level requirement. It's taken for granted you can already do that.
The degree part means learning music history, theory, and performance styles, working on performance projects, solo and with other musicians.
The analogy with ChatGPT is that it's taking over the entry-level part of the process. You can't expect to get onto a music degree if you only know how to prompt ChatGPT to produce a MIDI file for your entrance exam.
And in CS, you can't produce good code if you barely know what a server is.
It's all very Dunning Kruger. If you use an LLM to produce course work to get your piece of paper at the end, you don't even know what prompts you should use to do an unfamiliar job, never mind having the skills to do it yourself.
Yes they did actually say that. They go into the process of accreditation that would result in a person or institute being able to give a degree "in piano"
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