Curious how these school end up doing. When I was deciding what to do for college I really liked a place in Florida called New College. Horrible area (lots of old people) and apparently the place is weird (never visited), BUT the idea they have of creating contracts per semester and graduation based on completion of the required number of contracts is pretty cool version of this. It sounded like a whole college exp of basically self-researching/learning.
Didn't think it'd be good for CS so I didn't, but I imagine that's what the most successful of these schools will do to keep people creative and avoid the whole "one person does all the work"-group-projects.
I faced the same decision you did, had the same concern, and chose New College. I was fortunate in that CS at NCF has blossomed recently. A couple more professors were hired recently and there's increased student interest in the field. I've graduated, but I imagine there's also cross-pollination with the Data Science masters program that NCF founded this year.
As for what it's like to attend - the experience is less radical than you may think. People generally stick to taking listed courses. Creating your own course (tutorial) and finding a professor to sponsor it takes work. You can do it, I took several, but it's rare and the ease probably varies with your major.
With that said, even if you stick to taking courses, you'll still have to do an independent project each January and a thesis project before you graduate. Also, the experience of taking courses at NCF is different from the experience elsewhere. The size enables more discussion-based classes and the pass-fail/narrative evaluation grading changes student incentives and culture.
I cringe when I see articles such as this, leading research universities will always be superior to "teaching" schools. Not only is conducting quantitative research far more difficult than teaching, the research garners prestige and leads to higher rankings which attracts a more intelligent and ambitious student body. Ultimately the real value of a degree comes from the networking and signaling ability granted by it, I can always learn on my own by working through textbooks or reading journal articles. What I'd really like out of a university experience is to befriend people who will be starting innovative companies or researchers publishing in top journals.
I cross-registered for a class at Olin (featured in the article) which turned out to one of the top 3 classes I took in college. We inherited the designs for a portable vegetable grater from 6 previous semesters of work, and iterated further upon its design. We then produced 4 prototype graters and went to Ghana to sell them to rural Cassava farming women who generally have to grate the cassava by hand or use dirty, broken communal graters. We worked closely with the local university and metal shop.
By the end of the semester we were ready to hand off plans to get a batch of 10 graters produced on the next trip, and with further plans to get a pilot of 50 produced in Ghana in tandem with Ghanaian engineers and metalsmiths, and had plans to set up an unorthodox supply and distribution chain once the successive groups had secured grant funding.
I wouldn't discount the value imparted by a class that throws you into a project with smart people with strong personalities and tells you to figure things out in 3 months before putting your product in front of paying customers. Also, this type of "hands-on" class is generally a capstone that comes after the basic engineering classes that all of the Olin students take freshman and sophomore year.
Our professor was a brilliant guy and could have easily just focused on research and churned out great results, but he found it much more fulfilling to be hands on with our project and to guide us through the actual gritty process of creating a product and a business.
Having worked with R1-educated EEs who didn't know which end of a soldering iron to hold, I've got to disagree with you there. Abstract knowledge and social signaling can get you a job, but they can't make you useful once you're there. Some educators will feed you a line of BS about learning how to learn so that you can learn on the job, but that's very hard to do if you don't have any actual concrete skills. If, as you imply, you're still in school, I'd recommend you learn to be useful before you get out.
There are a series of logical fallacies in this post...to the point that it is nonsense.
For starters, what is a "teaching" school? is it the same as a teaching focused university? If so, not only do the faculty at teaching focused produce research of their own, much of which is extremely high quality, but the research often includes undergraduates in far more structured and educationally meaningful ways than occurs in similar programs at R1 type universities.
Another...and I'm going to stop after this...why the narrowing to quantitative research? Your incorrect assertion that research is more difficult than education goes against not only what we know about education, but against basic logic itself. Education is immensely more complicated than most research, its just a complication that people chose to ignore (because hey, your education worked sufficiently for you).
I have worked with several of the schools mentioned in this article (and if you want to know anything about me check out my prior comments and profile)...you say research universities are superior. On what metric? a lot of Olin students chose Olin over MIT. A lot of Deep Springs students (mentioned lower in the thread) choose it over places like Harvard and Yale. I feel like you might be better off reading some of the responses to your last effort to 'solve' education on HN.
I think time will tell for schools like Olin. I'm betting on Olin to be positive for my daughter. She will attend in 2017.
They are producing Fulbright scholars, NSF Graduate Research Fellows, and admittance to the best graduate schools for many of their graduates. At last count 140 companies are recruiting on campus for about 55 graduates a year (85 graduates and about 30 go to graduate school).
I tend to view outcomes as one of the primary measures of choice, both as a parent and also as a person that works for a liberal arts school that does not want to talk very loudly or directly about outcomes. But our parents want to know what outcomes are possible.
Your post is nonsense. The grandparent post had no logical fallacies, it was structurally incapable of having logical fallacies, by virtue of not making a deductive argument, just describing a factual belief.
The grandparent post stated a belief that research universities are superior to "teaching" schools, and then described ways in which they are superior, with an addendum about what the author really wants out of a university experience. It was an informative post (that I disagree with), but it had no premise, no conclusion, no deduction that could be fallacious.
> For starters, what is a "teaching" school? is it the same as a teaching focused university?
As you seem well aware, there are many conventional ways including R1 to classify research-focused vs teaching-focused schools, which all broadly agree, especially on the leaders in each category.
> why the narrowing to quantitative research?
This is an excellent point, and one of the reasons I disagree with grandparent.
> Your incorrect assertion that research is more difficult than education goes against [...] basic logic itself. Education is immensely more complicated than most research
Seriously, this is not how logic works. "You're wrong" is not a logical fallacy.
Regarding the actual point: while there's a case to be made that education is more complicated than research (perhaps even "immensely"), due to the same reasons that social sciences are more complicated than "hard" sciences, it doesn't seem any stronger to me than the case for the reverse. In particular, objectively there's more pay, status, and recognition for quantitative research than education (how many more people have heard of the Nobel Prize than...whatever awards they give out for teaching?), due at least in part to supply and demand, which says something about relative difficulty.
> ...you say research universities are superior. On what metric? a lot of Olin students chose Olin over MIT. A lot of Deep Springs students (mentioned lower in the thread) choose it over places like Harvard and Yale.
> Now you're making an actual point. Good for you.
Please edit the uncivil bits out of your comments here. If you like, you can do as I do and set 'delay' in your profile to up to 10 minutes to give you some editing time before your comment appears to others.
Oof, being chided by dang, I definitely fucked up. I do think my window for editing it had long lapsed by the time you commented?
Not that I'm entitled to your time, but I'd be grateful for clarification on the uncivil bits? "Good for you" was kinda condescending, I see; "Your post is nonsense" was in direct response to the first sentence of my parent, which said that grandparent "is nonsense", and is also factual and I made a good-faith case for it, is that really not okay?
I guess "nonsense" is a charged word, perhaps it should have been something like "That post was not nonsense, it is your post that makes no sense."?
Well, you get points back for using the word 'chide'. And you didn't break the rules that badly, which is why my comment was mild. But here's a detailed explanation.
Beginning a comment with "your post is nonsense" is leading with a left hook regardless of what was said upthread. Nothing good can come of it and it frames everything else that you say as hostile (even if it isn't). Perhaps there's a semi-technical meaning to "nonsense", but in the context of an internet forum it can only count as name-calling, which the guidelines prohibit (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). (By the way, rough-and-tumble discourse can function well in smaller, more cohesive contexts, e.g. research communities or literary salons. But it emphatically does not port to large internet communities. That's something it took me years to figure out.)
Replacing it with "it is your post that makes no sense" doesn't help much, does it? (It reminds me of "I'm sorry the honorable member is a liar.") You'd be better off not rewording that bit but dropping it altogether. Sticking to the substance is a better way to show (not tell) the weaknesses of another comment.
"Now you're making an actual point. Good for you." is just two condescending swipes in a row. That's like finishing with a couple of right hooks. And "Seriously, this is not how logic works" sounds condescending to me as well. If I read your comment without those bits it becomes much more substantive and respectful.
The editing time I was talking about isn't the two-hour window for which comments are open to be edited, but an up-to-10-minute window you can have before your comments appear to others. (That's the 'delay' setting in the profile.) That lets you see your comment in the wild before it appears to other users, which sometimes helps clarify where it crosses into incivility—which can be difficult to see beforehand.
I am sorry you got downvoted...your post was perfectly reasonable and correct. I didn't mean logical fallacy, poor choice of words at 2am while grumpy.
>Ultimately the real value of a degree comes from the networking and signaling ability granted by it,
Absolutely not. The intrinsic value of studies is learned from the studied material, the knowledge. Sure,
in relative terms, a research grant allows much deeper insights, and with it the prestige. A student that takes twice as long learns less relative to the time. But first order in the end, applicable knowledge is counting most. The certificates just prove that.
