Surprising Things About School
<i>&gt; Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates</i><p>I don&#x27;t see how that is a failure? MOOCs are a platform for &quot;just in time&quot; learning. If you run into a problem at work you&#x27;re not going to sign up for a four year university degree program to figure it out, but there is a good chance you will sign up for a MOOC and drill down into the specific parts that you need to close the gap to solve the specific problem you have. And when the next problem arises, you may continue further into the course. There is no reason to cover everything at once. This flawed opinion about failure may be directly related to #3.<p><i>&gt; Economically we vastly undervalue education.</i><p>Because it hasn&#x27;t shown economic value. The percentage of the working age population who have attained a postsecondary education has skyrocketed over the past 50 years, but incomes have remained stagnant. If the more and more people attaining a postsecondary education really were adding $10k to their yearly income like the article suggests, incomes would be rising substantially.<p>Those who have a degree, on average, make $10k more than those who don&#x27;t. But since this simply measures high-achieving people against low-achieving people, income conclusions cannot be meaningfully drawn from it. It is important to remember that universities and colleges reject the lowest-achieving people at enrolment time, preventing them from signing up for class entirely. Medium-achievers who make it past the initial filter are put through academic rigour that sees them drop or fail out. That leaves only the highest achieving people able to graduate.<p>Nobody should be surprised that high-achieving people are able to make more money than low-achiving people. This would remain true even if colleges and universities never existed. Finding something that correlates with high-achievers does not tell us anything other than this group of people is more likely to be high achieving.<p>Allowing more and more medium-achievers to graduate from university still leaves them as medium-achievers in life and they will still end up in the medium-achiever work that they always would have (after all, someone has to do it). All while incomes remain stagnant.